third time's a charm
by lejf
Summary: Soulmate AU: soulmates' thoughts are written on their match's hands. HP/TR (HP/LV) A story that follows Harry through canon events as he searches for his mysterious writer who always seems to be in pain.
1. the really short chapter

a/n edited for errors someone pointed out already present in this short chapter.

Punctuation now decided as as " _italics_ "

warnings now in place for story as a whole: copious use of italics, background hermione/draco, and ofc slash. also for some slightly graphic violence?

* * *

Young Harry Potter sat on the edge of his bed, staring at his hands. It was quite strange, really. There was one sentence that curled over and over again across his skin, coating every inch with blackness.

 _"You are finally here…"_ it said. It read the same thing every night. Just that. " _You are finally here, you are finally here, you are finally here…"_ Over and over again. It crowded his hands, filling them both with the ever-disappearing and reappearing loops. Harry stared at it as he did his chores, as he went to bed, as he was supposed to be weeding the garden.

Once they realised he wasn't doing it of his own volition, the Dursleys told him to cover his filthy hands up with bandages. Harry took them off whenever he could. He was so fascinated with the writing. Whose was it? It clearly wasn't his own hasty scrawl. Why was it there at all? It certainly added onto the list of odd things about him.

One night all the ink, like a dissipating cloud, cleared away for two elegant words. One on each hand.

" _You are finally here…"_

"... _Too late."_

–––

When Harry met a certain half-giant, the first thing he did was badger him about the writing on his hand. The answer left him slightly surprised, but mostly pleased: these were the thoughts of his soulmate? What sort of woman would she be?

Now that he thought about it, he thought he could feel her, distantly. He couldn't quite pinpoint if he sensed her in a physical location or just… a place in his heart.

It was all very sweet, he thought. Although it did seem to mean that falling in love wasn't a random set of happy coincidences, but rather predestined, he wasn't too deterred. Love did always seemed a little fated.

He smiled to himself as he followed Hagrid through Diagon Alley. He bumped into some snotty blond while he was buying robes, ate some ice cream, was gifted a beautiful owl, discovered the wild and unimaginable world of magic, and all was well.

A close eye was kept in his hand in the following few days. The words had started changing, now. And if Harry concentrated especially hard, he swore he could feel his soulmate in the back of his mind, curled there peacefully like a dragon.

His soulmate seemed to be a particularly irritable lady. " _Idiot." h_ e had seen cross his hand a few times. " _Incompetent."_ came up a few times, too. Nonetheless, Harry couldn't help but feel warm towards the writer. Those words in their elegant hand were proof that the magical world had been there all along, and they were proof that someone out there would really accept Harry, unlike the Dursleys.

He'd been pouring over his new books, too. One thing he noticed was that his soulmate's behaviour didn't quite fit the descriptions. She seemed to repeat words across his hands a lot, and he'd only really ever seen two whole sentences: " _You are finally here,"_ and " _...Too late."_ Was his soulmate illiterate? No, the writing was far too beautiful to be illiterate. Was their bond just weak? Harry prodded at the dragon in his mind again. It would be stronger once they met, apparently. Harry really couldn't wait to go to Hogwarts… even if just to escape his world for another.

When Harry met a freckled, red-haired boy on the train, they'd taken to each other like fire. After their initial stumbling blocks about Harry's scar and the whole Boy-Who-Lived thing, at least.

The topic of soulmates came up and Ron practically gushed. "I know she's in our year somewhere! This morning she was thinking about how excited she was. She's definitely on her way." The boy flushed to the roots of his hair.

"Mine never really says anything." Harry said with a frown. "She–" He broke off when he glanced at his hand.

" _help."_ The ink was a little less steadier than usual.

"–always seems to be hurting." he half-whispered. "I think our bond might be a bit broken."

Ron looked at him a bit critically. "Well, can you at least feel her on the other side?"

"Kind of."

"Close your eyes," Ron instructed, doing so and leaning back himself. "And you can feel… she's still excited right now. She's so happy…" The boy said a little dreamily.

Harry tried reaching for the sleeping creature in his head, but she did not stir. So he simply put his imaginary arms around her and thought _it will all be okay._

The word on his hand did not change.

* * *

a/n i have pretty much two chapters + tom's interlude written but i just really need to get this formatting sorted first because changing it all is a pain


	2. book 1

a/n warning for copious use of italics, background hermione/draco (more to illustrate normal soulmate dynamics than anything else…) and ofc slash. also for some violence?  
'soul' is sometimes used as slang for 'soulmates'  
i'm going to skim through these first few years because harry is still too young... just make a couple of key changes and move on. if you have problems with the pacing, take it up with me. don't see much point in re-doing entire first few years with the main change being a not-as-hostile Malfoy

* * *

During the Welcoming feast Harry swore he felt her for an instant. Just a stir, in his mind, and he almost jumped out of his chair. He was fascinated with all the magic in the castle around him, he really was, but these words had been with him since day one. She took priority.

One bushy-haired girl he'd chatted a bit with on the train was the perfect companion to talk to about soulmates. Hermione appeared to have read every book on it already. Unlike Ron, she excitedly showed Harry her hand.

" _Hogwarts isn't that impressive unless you're like my little Muggleborn…" T_ he words were written in neat little curls and then they disappeared, making way for another sentence, unlike Harry's who would haphazardly coat his entire hand with single, detached words. " _She ought to see the Manor one day... she will, and she'll probably redecorate the entire place."_ Hermione practically beamed. Harry swore even her hair puffed up with joy. It was strange, though. Her soul seemed to have surprisingly precise control over his thoughts.

" _Yes, yes. I love her too and all. I wonder if anyone has ever told her she's terribly excitable…"_

"I always thought I was just, you know, a Muggle. I didn't know what was wrong with my hands, but the doctors said it was nothing and it'd disappear after a while." Harry highly suspected these doctors were secretly wizards. "It didn't take me long to realise he was actually a person; he taught me all about magic! He's an Occlumens you know, so he's a lot more controlled than most... But he still told me I had to wait to find out his name, of course." Hermione said, glancing again at her right hand. "I can't wait to, well, match his face with the words. I mean, technically we've know about each other for eleven years... Enough about him! What's she like?"

Harry showed her his left hand. There was, as usual, just one elegant word repeated across the back of his hand. " _Troubling,"_ was written today. Hermione blinked.

"Wow– I– who writes their 'T's like that?"

Harry couldn't help but crack a bit of a sad smile at the girl before him. "Just her, I think. Everything she writes looks just like that… but she doesn't write often."

Hermione glanced up and spotted the longing flitting across her classmate's face. It was then, in a sudden impulse, that she decided to help him find his soulmate however she could. She took his hand and gave him the most determined look that she could. "In 1932 there was one wizard in a small village who was born bonded to a master of Mind Arts. He thought about sheep and the ranch all day long while his soulmate was wondering if he was, you know, worthy. She left him riddles and an entire trail to follow across the Pacific to test him."

"And he passed?"

"Of course." Hermione nodded with all her hair bobbing along. "Soulmates are always matched perfectly. Maybe not at the start, but whatever force bonds us always knows who we'll be at the end." Harry seemed to gain a hesitant hope at her words.

Just like that, the Golden Trio was formed.

–––

Hermione met her soulmate in some of the first few weeks of classes. The same snotty blond that Harry had bumped into at Diagon walked past them in the corridor sneering, "Nothing but a bloody Mu–"

Harry saw his expression falter and crumble as though he suddenly recalled another Muggleborn individual. The blond had opened his mouth to say something else, but a blur of red launched into the boy and suddenly Ron was there, breaking into a full out fist-fight. "Don't you _dare_ finish that word!" Ron roared. A few passersby stopped to stare.

Both Harry and Hermione leapt forwards, grabbing for their enraged friend's shoulders. "Ron, lay off–" Harry gritted. "The hell? He didn't even say anything–"

"You're an absolute prick, Malfoy! I know _exactly_ what you were going to say!" Ron shouted, blatantly ignoring Harry. The boy underneath had his hands up to block the red-head's blows.

" _...Uncalled for!"_ Harry saw horrifyingly familiar words race across the pureblood's hands. " _Hope he won't get into trouble."_

Harry was fairly certain his world stopped. Oh gods, Hermione was matched with _this_ pompous blond? This couldn't be happening. At least, Ron hadn't recognised the handwriting. That would've been a one-way ticket to hell.

He wasn't the only one startled. Grey eyes met brown and Malfoy faltered in his struggle against Ron, his eyes fixed on one person and one person only… but then a fist collided with his face with a sickening _crack_ and blood began to run down the blond's pale skin.

Hermione _screamed._

Harry threw pacifism to the wind and literally tackled his friend, bowling the two of them away, Ron cursing furiously.

"Mr Potter!" A voice cut through the din. Professor McGonagall came striding down the corridor and he felt his alarm ramp up. Oh, there went Gryffindor house points. And a couple of detentions for 'uncouth brawling.'

"Professor– I'm sorry–" he said, feeling Ron fall limp under him.

"The two of you, my office. _Now._ Mr Malfoy, you come along too."

Just before Harry was dragged away, Hermione let him catch a quick flash of her hand. " _So sorry… so sorry… Can't believe it's her. Can't let people know, you understand? Library later?"_

Despite all, he felt happiness well up inside him. Hermione would be fine, because git or not, she'd finally found him.

–––

Hogwarts was really an entirely different world. Harry was selected for the Quidditch team, discovered a three-headed dog, suspected Snape for attempted murder (which Malfoy protested vehemently against), went traipsing around the castle during late nights, helped cover up Hermione's relationship with the pureblood that was still a huge snobbish pain in class…

(Harry had honestly expected an explosion when Ron found out. Instead, one day his friend had sat down next to him in his favourite armchair, face slightly white.

"What's got you?" Harry asked absentmindedly, looking over a potions essay. He knew Snape would pick through it relentlessly so he really had to be thorough.

"You seen a couple who sits around like two peas in a pod?"

Harry paused, his quill halting. Was Ron referring to their friend and 'enemy'? He had probably seen Hermione curled up with her soulmate, reading. The two of them were such bookworms.

"I'm fine. I really am. Obviously he's still a giant prat, but I can't hate Hermione for it." Ron said. Harry let out an explosive breath, leaning back into his chair and looking up at the ceiling. "Okay, I might have blown my top a bit at first, but mate, I've learnt since– since I was five or something – that soulmates come first. Always. She'll probably actually be good for the bloody git."

Harry gave a weak smile. "He's afraid for his family name, so I don't think they'll come public soon. Maybe after 'Mione wins witch or the year or something. He and his entire family," he looked around to reassure himself that no one was listening in, "always knew she wasn't... like them. I mean, she'd think about microwaves or something and then somewhere in the Manor you'd see blond gits worrying about microwaves like mad. It probably tore them apart." Because Lucius was still technically a Death Eater, and what if the Voldemort came back to find that they'd taken in a Muggleborn? The Malfoy family had never been matched with someone who wasn't a pureblood.

He'd learnt that Malfoys always took family first, but obviously Voldemort would disagree: the tyrant himself was notoriously famous for living on with a dead soulmate and denouncing the entire soulmate system.

Then he looked down at his own hands and wondered when he'd meet the set that'd fit perfectly with his. " _help_ ," his hands read, " _help, help help help help help help help–_ ")

When Harry had come down from his latest match against Hufflepuff, the most strangest sight greeted him. Malfoy, cronies nowhere to be seen, was sitting on the plank-like bodies of Neville and Ron, both of which had locked legs. Ron looked utterly enraged whereas Neville simply looked a little down-trodden.

"Malfoy," Harry said, dubiously eyeing the Slytherin. He might've been Hermione's soulmate, but mutual acquaintance could only stretch so far. "Nice of you to greet us and all, but there are plenty of chairs around, you know."

"Oh, no, this was just to prove that I take down two blubbering Gryffindors on my own."

"–you're gonna pay for this, Malfoy–" Ron gritted from the floor.

"At least, unlike some, I can afford to," Malfoy said offhandedly. The thing about him was that he didn't even bother making an effort to insult Ron. It all just came naturally. Harry thought it was a little amusing sometimes, really. "But I need to ask," on his hand scrolled Hermione's neat print, "why are you looking for Nicholas Flamel, creator of the Philosopher's Stone?"

"Wait," the look on Ron's face from where he was pinned down by Malfoy's bum was of utter shock, "he made the Philosopher's Stone?!" he cried.

Harry couldn't help but laugh himself silly from the ridiculousness of it all.

–––

The year trudged on. Snape hated his guts, Quirrell ran away from students like the plague, Professor McGonagall was exasperated at the way he was always sneaking about at night, and Dumbledore seemed as barmy as usual. Slytherins kept talking about blood purity and how no one in their families had ever been matched with a Mudblood, there was the occasional moment in the Great Hall or the classrooms where someone found their match and everyone around them would whoop, Hufflepuffs were holding their traditional 'single's party' every month where all people of every year would mingle, and Harry only ever attended once. He just got attention for being a celebrity and knew, deep down, that his soulmate would probably hate those sort of parties.

Harry hadn't managed to get any closer to the sleeping dragon that was his soulmate, and he honestly didn't even know where to start searching for her. Everything she'd ever thought was so _vague._ Other people had vague thoughts, yes, (Ron still hadn't found his, who just seemed to be a typical girly girl with a fondness for flowers) but no one was as distant as Harry's.

Sometimes she'd stir and in the same instant his scar would flare with blinding pain. Then he'd try send her warm affection over the bond, but it seemed to peter out into nothingness. Harry mentioned these occurrences to Hermione, who roped Malfoy into scouring the library for information about Harry's strange bond with her. To no avail. It was easy enough, though, to distract himself with the everyday Hogwarts magical lifestyle and leave the worrying for later. She'd come. That was the main thing Harry had learnt about soulmates: you always found them.

It was actually kind of creepy now he thought about it.

Wizards and witches literally only had half their souls. If they had to wait too long, like ten years for their soulmate to be born (which hardly ever happened)... they went mad. If their soulmate died, they'd go mad too. The person who held the longest record for living after a soulmate died was actually _Voldemort._ But Harry supposed Voldemort was already nuts enough anyway. No one really knew who his soulmate had been nor how she'd died, but Ron had suggested one evening that, "You-Know-Who probably offed her himself."

"That wouldn't have happened." Hermione frowned. The three of them were settled in their respective armchairs in the Gryffindor common room, the room filled with a gentle buzz. Malfoy was off elsewhere doing pointy-faced things with the snakes of his house.

"Yeah, well, did you forget he's like number one mad murderer?"

"No," Hermione corrected him, "it's actually impossible to kill your soulmate. The spell backfires. I'm surprised you didn't know that, Ron. It's one of the first things listed in every book about the bonds–"

"It's not like we talk about killing our soulmates over the dinner table, 'Mione."

"Maybe his soul tried to off him," Harry said thoughtfully. "Although if really she was as strong as him, she probably wouldn't've made that sort of mistake."

"I'm guessing she died in an actual accident." Hermione theorised. "In any case, no one ever saw her. Ever."

Ron gave an exaggerated shudder. "He probably kept her locked up in some dungeon where she bloody starved to death."

Hermione had this rather strict look on. Harry suspected she was thinking about her miniature aristocrat and very much did not appreciate the thought of prisoners. "Soulmates would never do that to each other."

"This is _You-Know-Who_ we're talking about. Normal people wouldn't start up cults about blood purity, either."

"It's, well, it's hard to explain." the bushy-haired girl said. "There've been all these studies about psychopaths and whether they feel empathy for their soulmates–"

Ron gave a " _pah!_ " of disbelief and Hermione shot him a bit of a glare.

"–and they _do,_ because their soulmate is basically them. If anybody, You-Know-Who is probably a psychopath, but he would've cared for her." Ron gave another snort and then changed the topic for something like whether they should kick down the doors to the forbidden corridor, to which Harry contributed to gladly.

They'd get back to that conversation one day in the future.

Life raced on, and _they_ raced (Malfoy popping out from an alcove and sending Ron onto his bum in shock) to reach the Philosopher's Stone. It was with surprise that – just as Harry was planning to bust into the vault with the most convolutedly simple security system in the world – he saw a whole sentence spell itself across both his hands.

" _Deep in the forest…"_

He'd halted right in his tracks and that caused his three friends – although Harry wasn't quite sure if Malfoy quite counted as a friend – to glance back in surprise. All four students could make no heads nor tails of the sentence, so they dismissed it and went ahead anyway and tiptoed into the forbidden corridor.

" _Roots gnarled and twisted…"_ The next sentence appeared beneath the first.

A three-headed dog slumbered to their awful tunes and they slipped down into the awaiting darkness.

" _Canopy strangling…"_

A blue fire flared and a plant shrunk away, allowing them passage.

" _Swallowing all light_ … _"_

The four of them looked again at the growing paragraph on Harry's hands in slight alarm. With every slow, languid stroke, ominous jaws close in on them. Of course, the words made absolutely zero sense – Harry's soulmate didn't often make sense – but it was the fact that she was thinking so coherently that was frightening.

Could she have been capable of this all along?

" _And_ _the smoke_ … _"_

Did she know what they were trying to do? Or was it just coincidence?

The two Quidditch players hopped on brooms and snagged a battered key with ease. So they continued, feeling prickles creep down their spines.

" _It r_ _ises miles high_ …"

Ron lay unconscious on the checkered floor, but they moved on. Harry could see mirroring sentences flickering across Hermione and Malfoy's hands, reassuring each other that they'd do anything to protect one another.

" _That pyre of mine_ …"

Whereas _Harry's_ soulmate was thinking something else entirely.

" _Smoke eels. They squirm, w_ _rithe_ …"

The troll was already out cold, still filling the room with its stink. They hurried past knowing Snape, or whoever it was stealing the Stone, was ahead of them.

" _You must see them. The flames_ … _a blackened building…"_

"A lot of the greatest wizards haven't got an ounce of logic. They'd be stuck here forever." Hermione said, pacing around the row of bottles.

Malfoy didn't even glance at the riddle. "It's that one." He pointed at the tiniest bottle.

"No, wait, let me solve this first. We have to be sure." Hermione said, looking terribly like she wanted to gnaw on the back of a pen as she stared at the piece of parchment.

" _It's burning…"_ Harry couldn't help but continuously glance at his hands in distress while Hermione muttered to herself. " _And there you are, water spilling from your hands… You are finally here…"_

"I got it, Harry! Draco was right–"

"Of course I was." But he gave Hermione a smile anyway.

" –That's the one!"

" _Too late."_ The sentence was capped off with a very precise, crisp, full stop.

After much deliberation, after much desperate arguing, only Harry's body was flooded with ice and he stepped through the flames.

"You!" he cried as he recognised the man standing before the Mirror of Erised.

"Me," Quirrell answered calmly without even a hint of stutter. "I wondered whether I'd be meeting you here, Potter." Ropes wrapped themselves around Harry. "Now, how does this last trick work?"

" _...You are too late,"_ his soulmate continued to write.

"You–" Harry spluttered. For a good long while, Harry struggled in his bindings while Quirrell paced back and forth, relaying his life story: how he'd travelled far, searching for his Dark master and promising to bring back the fabled stone.

" _An eternity too late…"_ The words slowly traced their way across his hand, unfettered by Harry's panic.

Quirrell ordered him before the Mirror and as Harry stood there and looked into the glass, a man appeared behind him. His face was turned the other way so Harry could not see the identity he ached to know. But a pair of arms wrapped gently around the young boy, head of neat black hair bowing down to brush against Harry's messy own, and the man dropped a blood-red stone into his pocket.

"The stone, boy!"

"I don't have it." Harry lied.

( _Harry had found the Mirror one day in his late night patrols. What he'd seen… He didn't like to dwell on it often._

 _His family, which he'd stared at with unbridled longing._

 _A stranger who Harry knew instantly as soulmate, a smile across– across_ _ **his**_ _face. He had been unmistakably a man, any more features blurred by the magic of the enchanted glass._

 _Harry thought the Mirror must've been wrong.)_

"He lies…" a voice whispered. "Let me see him…" Quirrell's turban fell to the floor and his professor turned around with a deliberate slowness.

Harry's stomach dropped as he realised Voldemort himself was here.

" _I said goodbye when I stepped off that tower…" H_ is soulmate continued his own haunting message.

"Give me the stone, Potter!" the mutilated face hissed.

Harry backed away, Quirrell spinning around to raise his wand at Harry's chest. His professor's face was filled with unfamiliar exaltation and his eyes were dancing with glee, "Give me the stone! _I_ _mperio!"_

" _When I faced the bombing, the fire…"_ Harry could not only feel the ink, as if burning, trace its words, but he could also feel a presence beside him as though his soulmate had followed him out of the mirror. Like a blanket of comfort had been thrown over him, the man in the mirror seemed to hold him close in invisible arms. Or maybe this was what Quirrell's curse did. Made Harry go absolutely nuts.

 _"Today I rise."_

For a long moment, nothing happened at all. Quirrell's expression faltered. His eyes seemed to bulge. " _Imperio!"_ He cast again, and then the chamber exploded in front of Harry's eyes. He felt his brain burst; his scar split open like it'd been stabbed – a lance straight through his head, out the other end, pain splattering like blood all over the floor. Quirrell took a step forwards while Harry crumpled to the ground. With his eyes clenched shut, Harry could just about imagine his soulmate protecting him, that man with dark, neat hair and effortless poise, crouching right by Harry, arm curled over his shaking shoulders and filling him with fiery strength–

"Hand it over, Potter." The man squatted down to look Harry's bleeding face up close. "Give it–"

And _still_ the monologue continued, " _What can a stream stand against an inferno…?"_

The boy on the ground shot out a hand and grabbed hold of his professor, a yell of desperation tearing from his throat, the fire under his skin ripping free. His hand ignited in a blinding flash, flames engulfing his fingers with white hot fury. Quirrell lurched back with a cry of pain. His skin was blackened and burnt, robes smoking, and while Harry's was unblemished, even he felt pain like a thousand biting needles breaking his skin.

"Get the boy!" a high voice shrieked.

Harry was completely lost in his pain, head running with blood, but he knew one thing: Quirrell would burn at his touch. "Yeah, listen to your– your Dark Lord! Come get me– _come on_! You want your stone? I've got it!"

"Get the boy!"

Poor, stupid, Quirrell lunged forwards again, his eyes squeezed tightly shut as their lids began to blister. Harry's own vision swam through a curtain of stabbing pain. His hands seized both sides of Quirrell's face this time and the very air rippled with the heat that flared from his palms.

" _A droplet, against Fiendfyre?"_

His professor opened his mouth in a soundless scream, his hands still groping for Harry's pockets. How could one man be so desperate? Harry knew then, in that instant– Quirrell would be willing to die here. At his hands. Gods, how had he become so brainwashed?

He wasn't sure who was screaming. Him, the liar at his fingertips, or the pale white face of a snake.

" _The building_ _ **blazes.**_ "

Quirrell's skin peeled and his movements grew more and more frantic, scrabbling at Harry's robes as boy held on, horror etched on both their faces. The next howl rattled though Harry's bones, but his hands seemed to be stuck. Harry squeezed his eyes shut. The sight of Quirrell writhing was etched into his eyes. What was he doing? The heat was literally _cooking_ the other man. How could be possibly be–

A charred body slipped from his hold and hit the floor with a thud. It did not get up again. Did not breathe. Did not stir. Harry could only stare in horror, still seeing images of Quirrell's face twisted in pain. And now his professor lay on the floor.

" _Do you think you can 'love' me?_ _"_

Movement– but it wasn't from Quirrell.

" _Do you think there is someone left to love?"_

A pair of black lips shifted on the back of the man's head, barely parting. Voldemort's crimson eyes had been fused shut. His skin looked like melted wax with its mottled lumps and burns.

" _ **Give up.**_ " Harry was just imagining that those charred lips were mouthing in time with the writing on his hands. He was just imagining it. It couldn't be real. Voldemort was just gasping for his last breaths, because oh gods, Harry had– he had killed Qui–

His scar tore his skull open and then with a cry he, too, fell.

–––

There was light all around. Light – dancing in from the windows across his bed in the Hospital Wing. It was like he'd woken to heaven. Harry came to slowly, like a child waking for the first time. His eyes automatically darted to his hands, which he raised. The ink passage still lay there innocuously.

Then the memories of fire – of screams – struck him.

"Oh gods," he gasped, shooting upright. "Quirrell, Quirrell– he–"

"Ah, good morning, Harry."

The boy nearly fell out of the bed because he had _not_ seen Dumbledore sitting there. Where were his glasses? "Professor, sir, is Quirrell–"

"I'm sorry, Harry." Dumbledore said gravely. "I'm afraid that he gave his life up in the service of Lord Voldemort."

His heart was stuck in his throat. "So I... I–" He glanced back at his hands.

"You had no choice, Harry." his headmaster replied quietly. His eyes had followed Harry's gaze too, but the old wizard's face was unreadable. "But you can rest now. Nicholas is willing to give up the stone and Voldemort will not return for a while now."

"Flamel– he's going to die?" Harry asked incredulously.

Dumbledore fixed Harry with a look that made him want to look away. "It's much more difficult to live than to die, Harry."

He didn't know what to make of that.

"So Voldemort is gone for now." He tested the waters.

"Yes," his headmaster replied almost cheerily.

"And Quirrell is dead."

"Yes."

"And my friends are all fine."

"They happen to be right outside."

Harry hesitated. "...And you hired a teacher with Voldemort on his head, let him have a hand in protecting this stone you knew would attract his attention, left obstacles you knew both he and I could overcome, and basically set us up to verse each other?"

Dumbledore's face suddenly broke into a smile. "Yes, Harry, I did."

"Why?" he asked, suddenly aware of the fact that he was being incredibly demanding. "If… if you wouldn't mind sharing, sir."

"Oh, I merely set up a path that you could take, Harry." The headmaster replied genially. "You could've chosen to do anything. I wouldn't have stopped you."

That didn't really answer his question, but Harry supposed it would do for now. "Sir… in the chamber, when I touched Quirrell, he burned. Why?"

"That, Harry," his headmaster peered over his own spectacles, "was the sacrifice of a mother's love." The sunlight from the ward's windows illuminated the old man's face and Harry could map out every crevice, including one long scar that crossed the man's cheek. That mark had jumped out at him the first time they'd met. It was really the only scar Harry had ever seen on his headmaster. "The night Voldemort visited your family, your mother gave her life and that saved you. A man like Quirrell – whose sole ambition was power and greed – would never be able to touch someone so pure, protected by such unwavering love."

"You're saying my mum already saved me from the Killing Curse and she's saving me again." Harry said, meeting Dumbledore's solemn eyes with a frown. "My hands lit on _fire._ I don't think she would've wanted me to kill anybody."

"Lily would accept anything you do, as long as you were to remain safe." Dumbledore said seriously.

"I think–" He looked back at his hands, suspicion suddenly dawning as he recalled the heat from radiating from those words. "Do you know my soulmate, professor?"

"I knew many students, Harry."

"She must've come to Hogwarts…"

"He did." the old wizard said lightly. "He was truly a great young man, and I know you have just as much potential."

Harry felt like someone had just smashed a glass jug of ice cold water on his head. Dumbledore hadn't just said that. He hadn't... "Professor, you must be wrong." He said, mouth feeling awfully numb.

"I might be." Dumbledore conceded, his eyes never straying from Harry. "I do doubt it, though. I cannot imagine anyone more fitting as his, or your, match."

Harry felt like the world was dropping away under him. "Could you help me find him, sir? He's… he's hurting." The black words still rested there innocuously, spelling, " _Give up."_

"I'm sorry, Harry."

"Why not?" Harry asked. His soul was out there hurting, blocking Harry out, and bloody Dumbledore knew who he was! "You can interfere enough to have me _kill_ Quirrell, but find one man and then you can't raise a hand?! He– He's out there, and I know that deep down, he _does_ want me to go to him! Just help me get there, _sir_ … why won't you help me?" He asked desperately.

"Harry," the wizard began gently, unfazed by the boy's outburst, "if Ronald had asked you where your friend Hermione constantly disappeared to, would you have betrayed her secret?"

Harry just stared soundlessly at the blur that was Dumbledore.

"If you had to assure him that she was safe, but you could not tell him where she was, what would you do?"

Guilt crept up his throat. "I… I'm sorry, sir."

"No, your reaction was perfectly reasonable." Dumbledore reassured him. "But you will not need my help to find him; Ronald discovered Mr Malfoy after all, didn't he?" Harry nodded mutely. "The one greatest thing you can do for him is give him exactly what your mother gave you."

Harry blinked. "I have to die?"

"No, rather, you must love him unconditionally."

"I don't think it'll be hard to do that." he admitted, feeling strange saying it out loud. He didn't even know anything about his soulmate. He hadn't even known his gender! But over the year that sleeping dragon and its rare graceful words on his hands had become familiar to him. They were made for each other, and that was fact.

"Then all will be fine." Dumbledore assured him. "That is all you will need to do. Now – I've taken enough of your time. I ought to hand you back to your friends, Harry."

"Wait–" Harry said, something else still dangerously hanging on the tip of his tongue. "Sir, I don't want to offend you, but…"

"Ask away, my boy. I do not take offence easily."

Mustering all his Gryffindor courage and suddenly a hundred times more nervous than he had felt when he walked into the chamber to meet Quirrell, Harry said, "The thing is… if Ron asked me about Hermione, I'd tell him she was safe and not to worry, and he'd just have to rely on his trust in me. If that still applies now, I _do_ trust you right now." Because this was his headmaster, and because if Harry didn't trust this man out of everyone, he would be in deep trouble. Dumbledore – Hogwarts – had practically rescued him from the Dursley family.

Dumbledore blinked at him in some surprise, looking slightly taken aback.

" _But,"_ Harry could feel his nerves churning inside him, "if Ron was ever guessing and asked me if it was Malfoy, I think I would've lied and told him that it wasn't. Or just avoided the question. I get that. I _get_ that we need to hide the truth sometimes. So it's on this trust that I have for you that I'm asking now…" He took a deep breath, fully expecting to be reprimanded, "How many times did you lie in this conversation we just had?"

Then his headmaster broke out in the biggest smile yet, and to Harry's shock, he began to chortle. "Ah, Harry – you are absolutely excellent – brave enough to ask, loyal enough to trust, clever and cunning enough to understand… The answer, my boy, is once."

"Once?" He was still shocked that the old man had actually answered the question.

"Yes, Harry – and I believe I'll leave it up to you to puzzle out which one it was." With an outrageous wink, the headmaster stood from his chair and swept from the room.

–––

The school year ended in a plethora of gold and red and grumpy Slytherins. (Minus Malfoy, because his soulmate's joy seemed to radiate over to him.)

Harry knew that, by returning to the Dursleys, he'd be cut off from all things magical, so he asked his loyal friend Hermione if she'd do a bit of research for him. He asked Ron to take care of his huge, grinning family and told Malfoy to kick _his_ family into shape, or something along those lines.

He caught Dumbledore's twinkling eyes before he left the castle and wondered just what else the headmaster had in store for him. Their conversation in the Hospital Wing had given Harry a glimpse of the underside of the world, the strings that were tugged behind the scenes, and a whole other chessboard that he was unaware of. He couldn't step off the board and play like Dumbledore. He didn't have the skills, the knowledge, or the power to do that. He'd just have to be ready to prove himself worthy through all the trials his headmaster set him.

The platform arrived all too quickly, and with brief hugs, (again, minus Malfoy) Harry bid them all goodbye. It'd be too long a summer without them.

With one last goodbye, Harry waved and disappeared into the clutches of the Muggle world.

* * *

a/n kind of too much draco/mione in this chapter for my tastes but hey i swear they'll be out of your hair soon: i just needed to establish the change. you can guess why i'd need them later. Also might need to clarify Voldemort did not know harry was his soulmate. he just happened to be wishing his soulmate a happy goodbye because he thought he was going to get his body back, have Occlumency shields up, and cut all ties

did i mention i am _stupidly_ proud of that 'T'?

dont expect an update leading up to the 23th bc SAT.


	3. book 2

One thing Harry found himself doing over the summer was elevating the idea of his soulmate to a position of wonder. Some distant statue on the horizon, some boy, some person that had been there from day one. Enigmatic. A misty nebula that whirled with brilliant light, a boy like a dragon who could simmer like a furnace yet sear like a wild flame. And one day he'd swoop into Harry's life and whisk him away.

The other thing he stewed over during the summer was the fact that he was eleven and he had murdered Quirrell. He'd also realised, with a sinking feeling, that Quirrell's soulmate must've died too. Or be well on the way to dying.

Dudley was sent to some dastardly summer camp. Harry was shipped off with him, simply because the other two Dursley's had enough of his presence, and while the entire ordeal was brain-numbing, there had been counsellors on site - and although they'd never get the full truth from Harry, they did actually help. With the fact that Harry had murdered someone. Although, arguably, he'd also murdered Voldemort when he was an infant.

His friends did not send him letters. He practically pulled his hair out when he returned home, pacing his carpet into oblivion, watching a strange small creature destroy his house, and eventually – well – getting busted out of his prison in a flying car. (His friends hadn't abandoned him after all. It was quite heartwarming, really. But if anyone ever said he had shed a manly tear or two, he'd deny it vehemently.)

The school year started with quite the bang, Harry supposed, squirming his way out a car wreck. Just what had the little creature – Dobby – been _doing?_

From the very first DADA lesson, Harry realised that Lockhart was utterly incompetent. It wasn't that girls swooned over him – they had their soulmates to swoon over – it was just that people were inclined to believe and listen to charming people, so too few people called Lockhart out on his fluttery facade. All the while the school was going tits up as more and more petrified children were found in the corridors, and no one, not even Malfoy, could piece together who exactly was the 'heir of Slytherin.'

But nothing trumped the one time Harry had been in Charms, glanced at his hand, and seen his own name. " _Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived…_ " His soulmate was thinking about him! He flung himself at the dormant bond in his mind, but as usual, it did not react. Later he'd disappointingly realised that his soulmate must've just seen his name somewhere. Or seen his famous face. Harry really despised the fame.

(He asked Hermione and Ron, later in Potions when Snape briefly disappeared into his storage room the room, why soulmates couldn't just think their own names to each other. Both of them gave him this answer about how it was utterly unromantic.

"But what if you can't find them?" he'd asked, stirring his potion.

"Mate... remember how everyone everywhere says you'll always find your match? They say it 'cause it's true. Soulmates don't ever like not find each other." Ron said, confusingly. "Like magnets."

"Actually, not always." Hermione corrected. She didn't even look up from her cauldron. "You could die before you meet them."

Harry blinked in slight surprise, and after glancing around to make sure no one overhead, said in hushed tones: "Wow. That," he pointed his ladle at her in mock accusation, "was almost a _Malfoy_ answer. A bit more of the drawl and then you're actually one of their family."

"It's only been a year." Ron added solemnly at his side, shaking his head. "She's going to start growing white hair any second now."

Hermione looked up at them, one eyebrow raised and decidedly unamused. Then from the other side of the room, where Malfoy was standing next to Parkinson and must've seen something incriminating on his hand, a newt's tail came sailing to bounce against Ron's head.

(Malfoy had bought them matching pairs of enchanted gloves that allowed only the wearer to see through them. They were extremely pricey, but hey. The Malfoy fortune wasn't just for show.)

Harry would've laughed if the thing hadn't plopped into their cauldron, turned the entire thing a sickly green, and lost them a good fifteen housepoints. _)_

Throughout the year, Harry also noticed was that there was something rather strange happening with his soulmate's marks. He'd see one word curl its way across the very center of his right hand, spelling something like, " _Cold…_ " while _another_ word was being written at the very same time. The second writing hand seemed to be far more lucid. It'd swirl things like, " _I'll spin webs and webs for you…_ " The words alarmed him from time to time. His soulmate seemed to be plotting something. " _Tiring charades..._ "

Of course he'd gone straight to Hermione and then they attacked the library, researching cases where a soulmate transmitted two completely different thoughts at a time. They hadn't found anything, even vaguely similar. Sometimes Harry was beginning to wonder if the huge Hogwarts library wasn't enough.

But he still regarded his soulmate with the same attitude that most other people did. The one with the pedestal and the floodlights, with the huge red carpet and trumpets that announced true, beautiful, love, and the best person that would ever appear in his life.

(He'd asked Hermione again, redundantly, even though he'd scoured through oh-so-many books, if everybody was paired with _just_ one other person, fated to be, and he said, "Isn't that kind of weird? I mean, it's like… _too_ predetermined. You don't get a choice at all." It was strange, really, how the entire Wizarding World lay down to accept eon-old tradition. It wasn't that Harry had any objections. It was just that with the way the Wizarding World was always facing inner turmoil, he was surprised that they had actually agreed on something.

"Well," Hermione said slowly, "although they never outright reject each other, there are things such as platonic soulmates, too, if both of them aren't romantic people." Harry had read about them, but they weren't very common. "A soulmate is just the person carrying the other half of your soul. They'll be the most compatible for you in everything you do because in their core, you'll be the same. It technically doesn't really matter if you don't physically find them – though most people want to – as long as they're alive _._ But if your soulmate is killed, half your soul is gone and you go insane almost immediately. So you don't have to get in a relationship. But most people do, because no one else will ever fit them as well."

"Hey," Harry suddenly realised, blinking. "Snape lives apart from his soulmate, doesn't he?"

Ron, slumped in a chair nearby, the three of them gathered around a table in the library, groaned and said, "Blimey, can we not talk about the bat and his soulmate? That's weird, Harry. That's really weird."

"It's a bit more complicated than that." Hermione explained. "There's a whole spectrum of how close you choose to be with your soulmate. Most people are near the top, maybe ninety nine out of a hundred people, where they're very close and in a romantic relationship with. Some others choose to be more distant, like Snape. Obviously if he ever needs someone to be with as a friend or anything else, he'd go to her, but because one fundamental trait of their soul is that they're very solitary people, they're not actually in a relationship." She paused. "I think. I mean, Snape could always actually be dating on the side, but I don't think any of us want to think about that."

"Yeah." Ron agreed. "We don't. Really."

"So have people have dated outside of their soulmates?" Harry asked. The thing was, when Harry researched soulmates, he tended to look at the logistics. About how strong the bond was supposed to be, how to fix it, and things like that. He didn't tend to look up this sort of information on the romance portion of it.

Hermione and Ron both nodded. "But it's not recommended." she said. "Those relationships tend to fall apart because your soulmate is the one person who will absolutely, absolutely _get_ you. That's what the match is about. You might not see at ends together right now," Harry had the sneaking suspicion that she was thinking about a certain blonde and the way he still scoffed sometimes at Hufflepuffs, "but at the end of the day you'll reconcile, because you're both–" she flailed a little, looking for the right words.

"–made of the same stuff." Ron finished for her. "No one questions it anymore, because it's been like thousands of years and every time whoever's writing on your hands has always been perfect after you get to know them."

"Another thing that you already know about is the strength of the bond," Hermione said with a glance at Harry's hands. "It really affects how close the soulmates choose to be. Most people are at this moderate level where they can feel strong emotions over their bond, and if they concentrate, the current mood. While the thoughts they _see_ depend on their control over Mind Arts." She looked slightly abashed as she said, "Things like Legilimency and Occlumency are actually illegal, so don't go learning them. But anyways: the thoughts that are the clearest are normally thoughts that are directed at the soulmate. Otherwise it'll just be mundane things, maybe two random thoughts picked out of your mind every hour. Out of context, it is actually really difficult to piece together who your soulmate is. So–"

Ron cut her off, said with a grin,"–So good luck finding them, eh?")

Currently up to his ankles in sloshing water, Harry stood staring at an irritating book jammed halfway down a toilet while Myrtle complained in his ear. The things he got into. Fixing girl's toilets? He was doomed to become a janitor. Someone in distress would lure him into the bathroom and then trap him into a life of toilet-cleaning servitude.

The sad prospect of his future was pushed aside as Harry reached out and touched the book, an electric shock leaping through his body. His senses felt clear for the first time in his life, his mind raced, and it was like a window had opened in his mind. He reeled in the sudden flood. Without hesitation, the thing had gone into his bag, and although he'd tripped on a bloody dwarf and it'd gone flying alongside a jar of ink at one point, he'd snatched it back and continued on his merry way.

" _Who is he? Who is he?_ " one of his hands read.

"Harry," Hermione later said worriedly, "Draco told me that that diary's something his father had been keeping. It might be cursed… You really should get rid of it."

"I will, Hermione," he said distractedly, not at all planning to toss it away. He felt a strange sort of need to keep the plain diary, besides the obvious 'it made him feel alive' thing. One part of his soulmate also seemed to be absolutely ecstatic: " _He was there, who was he?"_ The other, well, simply: " _Silence…"_

It sat forgotten in his dorm for a hours, but when he finally flipped open the battered thing, fingertips feeling alight, and saw the name–

The name–

T. M. Riddle.

That _T._ He would recognise it anywhere, oh gods, this was his soulmate's diary. Harry had finally found a gaping huge clue about him, about the– the _boy_ he'd been looking for.

And he'd also spilt an entire jar of ink onto it earlier today when he had fallen.

Panicking slightly, Harry hurriedly flipped through the first few pages and found that they were, thankfully, blank. Maybe not thankfully. Harry looked over the rest of the book, wondering why it hadn't been touched by the ink and why it was, of all things, empty. He hadn't imagined T was the type to waste a good journal like this.

Well, if it was his soulmate's unused diary, who would be a better owner? On a whim and in the safety of his dorm, he brought a quill to the page and wrote: _My name is Harry Potter._

Startled, he watched as the ink faded (was the diary enchanted?) to be replaced with instead with: _Hello, Harry Potter. How did you come by–_

The writing stopped dead still.

 _Is that you?_ The words were slightly shakily. _Harry Potter, are you… mine?_

The only thing Harry noticed was how the writing was so achingly _familiar._ He wanted to wrap it up in a little glass case, frame it, and make sure nothing ever tarnished it. With his heart in his throat, he wrote only one word: _Yeah._

 _I'm Tom Riddle – I'm in the diary._ The words were written quickly and hurriedly, almost stumbling over each swirling stroke. _Tom Marvolo Riddle. I can't believe it's you, of all people, it's really you…_

Harry gaped to himself, hands stilling over the quill as he the words registered in his mind. This was his soulmate? The diary seemed to pull at him in a way nothing ever had, not like the one time Harry had been so close to swallowing Amorentia – which had been a sudden blow to the senses – but rather like a gently extended hand that curled around his. It was real; it really was. His soulmate was _in_ this diary. His heart bloomed at the thought. His _soulmate._ Similar words of disbelief were repeating themselves all over his palm, almost obscuring his hand's first writer. _Tom… h_ e wrote, _why're you in there?_

 _One way to assure I'd keep living and waiting, but you're here now. Salazar– Harry, you're here, you're really here._

He soulmate seemed a little crazed, but Harry really didn't care at all in that precise moment. … _You don't need to wait anymore. It's okay, Tom. I'm not going anywhere. How long have you been trapped in here? When can you get out?_

Harry would have his soulmate _._ The thought felt foreign, but he could sense a grin sneaking onto his lips. His fingers still thrummed with the urge to keep the diary close and never quite let it go.

 _Longer than anybody ever should. Don't worry, Harry. I'll be out of here in no time... With you. Could you believe it?_

 _I can't believe it either._

There was a pause. _You might've noticed that my soul's been split._ Tom wrote hesitantly.

So _that_ was why. Harry had never heard of splitting souls before; he couldn't begin to imagine what would've driven Tom to those lengths. He couldn't even imagine why anyone would want to do that! It sounded painful. _Why did you have to split your soul?_ 'Have to', because Harry didn't think someone would willingly go through that.

Another pause.

Again, the words were written slowly. _I used to visit a cliff by the seaside._ Harry could see it, a boy with tousled hair shifting from foot to foot as he listened to the crashing of the waves below, salty tang heavy in the air. _Where the water would come as a shock. A blinding, jarring, shock that made the other children squeal. But the cold was really of no consequence. Because wallow long enough, hold your breath and dive until you cut your hands on the rocks below,_

 _and it won't be so cold anymore._

–––

The next day the diary had vanished from his dorm and Harry had panicked until he glanced down (" _...be with him soon… one last game...")_

Harry hadn't divulged all the details about his soulmate to his friends. He'd tell them once he got more answers about why Tom had been in the toilets. And he'd also try drag some answers out of Malfoy later, although he doubted Malfoy would know why his father had owned the diary. He tried going to the library discreetly, looking through old records for a boy named Tom Riddle. In the last ten some years, though, he didn't see anything about a boy called Tom who had split his soul because Harry had been born too late.

So when Ron came back from detention (that he'd earned by flinging potion ingredients back at Malfoy in class, accidentally tossing ginger _into_ Malfoy's cauldron and blowing up the entire room) mentioning a certain name and Harry heard the _year_ that Tom had been awarded–

No one had ever lived past the age of thirteen without seeing words appear on their hands, because they were _half a soul._ The other half of them didn't _exist._ They all chose to end it before then. Tom was bloody insane. Also… Tom was that old?

Well either way, he threw himself at that sleeping dragon in his mind and repeated, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," even though it was ridiculous, really. How could he control when he was born?

Then he had no more time to worry about Tom because Hermione had been petrified.

Now Harry was hearing voices in the walls, Ginny had just disappeared alongside an ominous message, Tom hadn't returned yet, Dumbledore had been left the school, and Hermione was lying frozen in the Hospital Wing with a note clutched in her hands. It was all going down the highway of disaster and straight to hell. Malfoy was privately tearing himself apart, of course, but Harry felt a jolt when he realised what she'd meant by the _pipes._

One wand mishap, an Obliviated Lockhart and a cave-in later, Harry was alone in the darkness. His breathing was too loud and he heard a _drip, drip,_ dripping _._ "Ginny?" He called, fearing for the fire-haired girl. What if the basilisk had already got to her? "Ginny?"

He emerged into a high stone chamber fitted with snake statues and felt a chill run down his spine. But down the very end, a dash of red hair caught his eye. "Ginny!" He called, breaking into a run. "Are you–" There was another figure sitting by the girl. An ethereal boy who seemed to flicker, with dark hair and darker eyes and he was sitting right by a black diary on the floor. Harry's words caught in his throat and he nearly stumbled over his two feet. "Tom?"

(At least Tom wasn't actually seventy years old, right?) But his world shuddered to a halt because there was the boy, the puzzle piece, that would match into his life.

"Hello, Harry." Tom replied softly, his eyes already cataloguing his soulmate's every detail. As for Harry– if he hadn't already in love, he was now. His soul sung for the sitting boy. From his green Slytherin tie to his sharp, grey eyes to his carefully swept hair, his effortless poise and his long graceful fingers that once wrote such gorgeous words. Harry wanted to sink into those arms, just like the Mirror of Erised had shown him. But his awe held him still.

Tom seemed to be equally entranced. "It seems that my soulmate was real, after all." Tom murmured, glancing down at pale hands where Harry could see his own messy scrawl flickering.

" _I'm_ real? How about you? You popped out of a diary!" He hadn't even realised he'd taken steps forwards and sunken to his knees in front of the other boy. Tom, his other half, the other part of his soul, was subconsciously pulling him in like a ship into a whirlpool. Inescapably. Inevitably. To reel him in and then scatter him as debris over distant shores.

He failed to realise, too, that Ginny had stirred just behind Tom. "Anyway, Tom – explanations later, like, entire diary thing – we have to get out of here. There's a basilisk coming. You know, huge snake that kills with its eyes?"

"There isn't." Tom replied calmly. "It doesn't come unless it's called." So enamoured were they, neither of them noticed Ginny, nor the fact that Tom's diary was sitting right at her fingertips.

"And it won't get called now? How're you supposed to know that?" Harry asked, fingers curling as the ink on his hands began swirling and swirling. As if, in the presence of his soulmate, it was trying to leapt right out of his skin.

"Because I know who was summoning the basilisk."

"You–" Harry said suddenly, eyes widening, his eyes darting down to his hands where a dreadful sentence spelled itself across his skin. "It–" Mouth went dry, words twitching and writhing just out of reach. "What? It was... you? It was..."

"I'm the Heir of Slytherin, Harry." Tom said awfully, awfully, gently. His words echoed in the empty chamber and maybe also in Harry's suddenly blank mind. "One little girl found a diary. My diary. She poured her heart out to me, I listened to her woe after woe, insecurity after insecurity. I possessed her, temporarily gave her the snake's tongue… and she's been setting the basilisk on the students ever since."

Harry couldn't find his words. This was his soulmate? _This_? "So you wanted to kill Muggleborns? You want to kill Muggles?" he asked, shock and disbelief and hurt all colouring his voice.

"The basilisk did not kill anyone." Tom's face was a smooth mask as he said, "As the heir, this was my legacy. You should understand that I took it because it was meant for me. But I've found you now, Harry, and I couldn't care less about–" But when Harry glanced at his hand all he saw was a steady, " _know he hates killing."_ So his soulmate would lie to his face too, then?

"Your legacy? _Really_." Harry gritted, backing away from the boy who was supposed to complete him. The boy who even Dumbledore claimed would be perfect for him. Some part of Harry wanted to stay as close as possible and docilely curl up to Tom, but his temper was building far too rapidly for that. "If you actually believe what you're saying, grow a pair and stop listening to what your ancient great grandfather says. I can speak Parseltongue too – am I trying to make snakes kill people? And what the hell are you doing to Ginny?"

None of them looked over at the girl in question who was quietly muttering under her breath.

There was a long, prominent pause. "I'm taking her soul to regenerate mine… You don't want me to kill her?" Tom asked. The words on Harry hands, too, reflected this: " _Thought he didn't care for her. Stupid. Should've known, hero as he is."_

Harry felt rage surge up in him like a tidal wave – at the world for pairing him with such an insane soulmate. At Tom. At the fact that Tom sounded genuinely puzzled and that made Harry even feel _guilty_ about his anger. Or maybe the guilt was just his stupid soulmate bond speaking.

He leapt to his feet in fury. "What the hell is wrong with you?!" His words were edged with fire and he swore he saw Tom flinch. He hoped it was at the loudness, if nothing else. The bond in his head was still stubbornly closed and Harry couldn't find himself caring why.

Then whatever part of Tom flinched was gone and those grey eyes darkened. "Perhaps what's 'wrong' is that I trapped myself in a diary for forty nine years waiting for you _._ " Tom said coldly, still sitting passively on the stones. "So what if I kill one more person so I can have a body to be with my soulmate?"

Harry– he panicked at the reminder that this person was supposed to be his other half. He'd always expected his soulmate to be a fiery, loving girl. Recently translated into a fiery loving boy. He hadn't ever expected an obsessed psychopath that went sucking the life out of his friends. The words that came from his mouth had absolutely no filter at all. "I won't let you kill anyone. _Ever._ " Harry said, defiance thick in his voice. "If you do, I'll kill myself to end you."

"What valiance." Tom sneered.

"Trust me," Harry said. "Even though you obviously don't give a rat's ass about everyone else's life, I do! And I'd do what it takes to save them, even if it means–"

Tom's facade slammed in so quickly that Harry was nearly blown away by the sheer intensity in his dark eyes. "I grew up in a certain type of world." He said icily. "It's only natural that the only way I know how to live is in one like it."

"Then I'm telling you now that that's no excuse! You were going to kill my _friend._ You were going to kill all these people because of _what?_ "

"I don't think you understand," Tom replied, ever the statue, "that I've always done what I must."

"Yeah, like you _had_ to go opening the chamber and trying to kill people!"

"And what would you know of killing? Of grasping onto what little you have, you _child_?" Tom asked scathingly, his demeanour so cold that it seemed to burn. Harry felt his words bite and– gods, even his soulmate loathed him. His chest felt like there'd been a hole blown through it. "If my heritage is the one thing that makes me a capable wizard, then I will use it relentlessly. If killing is the only way I can scrabble for power, then so be it! What a _pity_ that I do not have the privileges of your luxurious life–"

"My luxurious life? _My_ life _?_ My parents are _dead!_ " Harry shouted, his hand leaping for his wand. He was so angry, he was just– it wasn't that he _hated_ Tom (he was supposed to love this boy, wasn't he?), but it was as though there was a fury eating him from inside out. Clawing, snarling. How dare Tom? Tom knew _nothing_ about him. Nothing at all! "I live with Muggles who treat me like trash! They starve me and work me like a slave and lock me away in a bloody cupboard! I've never had to kill any of them, have I?"

"No, you didn't," Tom spat, fury sparking behind the cold in his eyes. "Because none of them would've killed you. None of them would've beaten you and left you out in the stones. None of them would've pushed you off the cliffside, waiting for you to smash onto the rocks below in a spectacular accident. _Shut your_ _ **mouth**_ _,_ _Harry_ , you have no _right_ to speak of suffering. If you wish for me to spare her life, I will. But if you choose to direct your 'righteous' anger anywhere near my actions, kindly _leave_."

Harry felt sympathy and anger _for_ Tom surge in him and even more furious, he tamped it down. "Stop trying to get me to feel sorry for you!" This wasn't some sort of contest about who had the shittier childhood. Bad childhood or not, there were no excuses for cold-hearted murder.

(Quirrell.) No, he hadn't intended to… He'd felt bad about Quirrell. He'd regretted it. He was forced to do it, unlike Tom.

Tom was just playing him. Redirecting the conversation to get Harry to pity him to overlook the fact that Tom had apparently tried to murder all these students in the school just because he 'wanted power.' He must've had an ulterior motive, something he was still lying to Harry about. Harry could _feel_ it.

"I know you won't hesitate to lie to me. I know what you've done to Ginny, I know you tried to kill all the Muggleborns–"

Then he saw it. The truth flitted across his hands. " _Idiot... was never her or any of the Mudbloods it was all_ _ **him.**_ " What wasn't the Mudbloods? The only thing Harry knew Tom wanted from Mudbloods were their deaths—

A hand plunged straight into his chest and tore his heart in two.

"Me?" he said numbly, and then everything on his hand was wiped away aside from the insane one-worded ramblings as Tom's Occlumency shields undoubtedly slammed into place. "Me." he repeated. The chamber stretched around him, walls seeming to warp. But it all made sense. "It was me. You wanted to kill me. The famous little Boy-Who-Lived."

"I didn't know you were my soulmate." Tom said flatly as if that would excuse anything.

"Everything you told me before was a lie." Harry couldn't feel his hands or his heart, or anything at all. Only his blood rushing in his ears. "Soulmates obviously mean nothing to you. You just met me and you're already lying as much as you can. You still just want to kill me, don't you?"

"Never." Tom said. Harry didn't believe him. "I wanted to know how you killed Voldemort – if you'd still be a threat – but my allegiances have obviously changed."

"So you're a Death Eater too, now?" Tom didn't deny it, staring resolutely at Harry, "You're on the Dark side and you're pretending to get cosy with me? I should've seen it. _Gods_!" Harry couldn't find the right words to express how he felt. "You know what? You–" It was clawing to get out of his chest: the fact that Tom had blatantly lied to him, that Tom was happy to kill people under the pathetic excuse of a bad childhood, that was siding with the killer of Harry's family all along– "You _disgust_ me!"

(He refused to look at his hands, from where Tom's thoughts had slipped through the bond anyway, " _...thought at least_ **you** _would accept me.")_

This couldn't be his soulmate. Harry wouldn't believe it. A soulmate was supposed to be made for him. They were supposed to lay their eyes on each other and fall in love. A soulmate couldn't possibly be so flippant, so cruel, so hateful…

"No," Tom denied vehemently, his eyes flickering up from where they'd glanced at his own lithe hands, the ice in his expression melting and giving way to some other foreign emotion, "It's–"

But Harry would not be deterred. "I don't believe that you're _any_ part of me." He said, a hissing filling his ears. "You must've used some sort of magic to enchant my hands. Look at you. You're bloody psychotic!"

"No," Tom repeated. His back straightened, face shuttering over with a stoic mask. His words were clipped and intense grey eyes were locked with green. "I'm feral. Broken. Whatever you deem fit to call it. But most of all, I'm yours _._ I'll defer and I'll kill and I'll spare and I'll take over _the world f_ or you… I'd wait with a gaping hole in my soul for forty nine years." His ephemeral hands were fisted in his robes, fingers tight. "I'd split myself on stones and shards and turn around to see _still_ that I'm incomplete _._ The laughing stock of _your fucking gods._ Aren't you just ashamed of meeting somebody who's given up everything for you, Harry Potter?"

The silence stretched taut between them: Harry on his feet and his hand on his wand, Tom on the ground with an expression so unreadable that it gave Harry pause. How much of it was a lie? There were two writers on his hand after all. Tom could still be a fraud. Or Tom could be a broken boy, doubted by even his soulmate.

Harry's hands read, " _Thought it could never get worse."_

"I see how it is," Tom said emotionlessly, finally tearing his dark eyes away from Harry to turn them towards the floor. "You may choose to leave. I will not stop you. If you are as self-sacrificing as you say, I'm sure you'd rather die than accept me as your soulmate."

" _He hates you._

G _ive up."_

At the sight of the familiar words, it was like a pair of floodgates opened inside Harry and a torrent brought him to his knees. All those times his soulmate had called out in pain. That once his soulmate had told him to give up. The way he was so drawn, so empty, so hopeless – it was _Harry's_ doing. It wasn't Tom. It was Harry who was the horrid soulmate. It was true, Tom was really hurt, Harry had really hurt Tom, _his_ Tom, right through his stoic mask. Oh Gods, his Tom, Tom. He felt sick.

"No. Tom," he choked, feeling this horrible guilt and a whole swath of confusing emotions wash over him, "I'm so stupid. I didn't– It's not that I don't want you to be my soulmate. It's just that–"

Then Ginny screamed " _Bite the halfblood!"_ in parseltongue and everything fell apart.

A black book was thrown into the air, thudding against Harry's chest where he clutched at it in shock. Water exploded from all sides and he heard something whistling through the air _right towards him._

"Harry! Run! Let it bite the diary!" the girl shouted.

Tom's head snapped up. "No!" he gasped, his grey eyes wide. " _Stop!"_ he commanded in the snake's tongue, but the great beast was already half-way through its strike. Harry dove to the side, his agility of twelve years coming into play, landing hard against the stone floor.

Except the basilisk's jaw was really too wide to be dodged by a quick little dive. Ginny called for Fawkes again, desperately, as she watched Harry throw himself right in the path of the basilisk's deadliest, sharpest, fangs. They'd go right through his chest and he'd be dead. Instantly. Ribs crunched into shrapnel.

Tom's eyes met Harry's and Harry was paralyzed by the helplessness and hope that flashed in that dark grey. He saw the aftermath of their argument: pain and fear and agony so deep that he could drown _,_ yet there was still a spark that was reserved just for Harry, like a fire during a cold night...and suddenly it clicked into place. The knowledge that despite all that Tom might've lied, he was really Harry's soulmate, and he really would give up everything–

Tom could've taken the diary from his hands and fled.

Instead, a body barrelled into his and Tom's half-solid form was tackling him to the side, the two of them rolling across the stones. Harry was facedown on the ground, head turned to the side, diary beneath him, Tom besides him yelling in his ear and gripping his hands tightly ("Harry– tell lady fate to go to hell!"). And it felt right to be held. By Tom, just as he was about to die.

" _So idiotic so ignorant so foolish but worth it – always worth it–"_

The longest fang speared right through Harry and out the other end. Its jagged tip screeched against the stones.

Missed the bottom of his ribcage by only hairs. Dragged him forwards across the floor like a corpse on a pike, Tom wrapped around him.

" _Harry, Harry, look down. Don't look at me, look down,"_

He couldn't process anything as he heard his blood splurt and felt pain burn through him. His death clawed up through his body with a razor sharp bite. A dark wave. Teeth and teeth and teeth and _blood–_

–just stared into grey eyes and held on.

" _I did it I–"_

It had skewered him and the diary he was holding. Its other teeth grated into his spine, splitting his back open and sending his blood spraying. It was like being skinned alive, like being boiled, like having your heart ripped out still-beating.

Tom's mouth was open in a gasp and Harry saw it moving, but he couldn't hear a word. ("Harry– Harry, _I_ did it–")

" _Look down look down Harry, fuck– down at your hands– I did it I killed them Harry your parents your family–"_

A dark splatter exploded across Tom's stomach like spilt ink. Harry couldn't even call his name, couldn't even think, could only watch as Tom dissipated in an invisible wind, his body vanishing as the diary began to bleed something dark like blood.

" _your friends your people everyone **I** killed them–"_

The words on his hands faded and he never saw them even once.

"Harry!" Ginny called, but Harry could not hear. "Please, Fawkes!" Blood gushed from him, right below his ribcage where it had grazed bones, a little to the left, in a huge, inevitable wound. It flowed all over his fingers which now devoid of Tom's tight grasp, swirling with basilisk venom. The world distorted as though from deep underwater.

The fang pulled out, the great beast suddenly bellowing in pain, and Harry was engulfed by the unforgiving black.

* * *

a/n tom's interlude has been reworked so that it will not be read as a standalone chapter.

sat results came back and i suppose they're decent considering the avg score is like... 1500 (lol) and i took it early because i wanted to do the old one before they changed the test. but i'm a little miffed because i badly in some bits but not so badly that i'll take it again

 _: (_


	4. book 3 start

a/n what a long wait for such a short chapter! and no tom in it, either! ;0

second one goes up tomorrow. i had to spilt it in two (the book 3 plan was one short paragraph long, what happened)

the ‽ interrobang looked silly so ?! it was.

* * *

He did not wake gently this time. Not like the time he'd fainted after killing Quirrell.

He woke in the night, screaming.

" _Tom!"_ was the first word on his lips. His body was burning all over, but his mind was numb. "Tom!" All around him was a whirlwind of movement where Hermione and Ron jumped, startled awake. "TOM!"

"Hey, Harry... it's okay. Harry." Hermione's familiar face appeared in front of him. "If you keep shouting we're going to get kicked out."

"Where's Tom?" he asked frantically. The hospital wing was buried in moonlight, the previously Petrified victims all already restored, and there was no other black-haired boy to be seen. "Where is he– gods, where is he, Ginny– Ginny?"

"I'm over here." Ginny called. She was in a bed beside his, separated by an open curtain. She was the only other occupant of the hospital wing, sat among the blankets, propped up by pillows, looking infinitely weary. "Harry, take deep breaths. Calm down." He was surprised she was still in hospital.

" _Tom?_ " Harry saw Ron mouth at his sister.

"Tom was the one who attacked us in the Chamber." Ginny said, sparing Harry a brief glance. "The basilisk accidentally stabbed him and once its master was dead, it gave up."

It was a heavily edited version of events, but Harry was nonetheless grateful for it. She must've known that Tom was his soulmate and that Tom was– had been– a Death Eater. She must've thought Tom was a threat. He had possessed her, after all. He'd been planning to kill Muggleborns, after all. And Harry had been yelling at him. He couldn't imagine how his friends would react if they knew. When he looked down, his hands were shaking. His hands were–

There were still words on them. " _Suffer…"_ They curled languidly, but tonight there was no second writer.

Harry had distracted Tom and given Ginny the chance to make a move. He'd shouted at Tom, told him he didn't want him, told him he was a liar and a psycho. He'd blown his top at a boy who'd been trapped in a diary for forty nine years, just because he had supported the other side of the war. Tom had been his _soulmate!_ Harry shouldn't have been so bloody angry.

Despair crashed down on him like a wave, followed by a heavier burden of guilt. Guilt that he'd never even managed to apologise for rejecting Tom in the worst way possible.

Harry could still feel the blocked bond. Tom must've awakened as the second writer when Ginny somehow found his diary, but now he was gone. Part of his soulmate was dead. Harry could almost laugh. Look, he'd managed to end a life once every year. And look, his soulmate had somehow split himself into two. Even better: their bond was still so broken and weak that Harry only ever saw a few words and didn't feel any of his soulmate's emotions at all.

He wanted to cry more than laugh, though... but he tried to box away that despair. He couldn't spend all his time wallowing in mourning. He had to find the other part of Tom – the one that had made it obvious he didn't want to be found. The one who talked about burning deep in the forest in a pyre that Harry couldn't hope to put out. Harry Potter wasn't one to give up. He had a trail now, and he was going to hunt Lucius Malfoy down and wring out every last drop of his secrets. He would turn his guilt at Tom's death into this fiery _drive_ to set it all right.

"Mate, you okay?" Ron asked, peering at him in concern. "You've been out for over a week, and you still look, dunno– haunted, kind of."

He _was_ haunted. "Yeah," Harry lied. "I'm okay."

–––

Night. Long shadows and a now-empty room. Ginny had been released only a day after he'd awoken. Once Ron and Hermione had been chased out, the two of them sat in this taut silence and said nothing. He wanted to ask her why, how, why why _why_ , but he just– _couldn't_ bring himself to open his mouth and acknowledge what had happened. That he'd made mistakes.

Not long after Harry was released from the hospital was he called into Dumbledore's office. He had a whole cauldron of questions he needed to ask, but he honestly didn't even know where to start. So when he slumped down in the chair and refused a lemon sherbet, portraits pretending to be asleep around him, the headmaster's office feeling too full of light and gold, the first words he said were, "I failed."

Dumbledore looked mildly surprised, his white eyebrows raising ever so slightly. "I wouldn't say that _,_ Harry. Quite the contrary. The school has been saved! The chamber closed, and not a single student killed."

"No. One was." Harry said grimly. "Tom."

His headmaster's expression turned grave.

"I failed you, sir." Harry continued. "The one thing you said I needed to do. I didn't. I just– I was so stupid and I let myself be angry. He didn't let it show, but he was so hurt. I failed him, sir, I failed you, I failed _myself–"_

"Harry," his professor said only somewhat sternly but with all the effectiveness of slammed bars. "As long as you acknowledge your temper was out of hand and seek to improve it." His features softened. "I'm certain that you'll have more chances to meet Tom in the future."

Harry was looking at his hands. "But he won't be the same, will he?"

"No," Dumbledore agreed. "He will not. But his heart will remain as it always has. As I'm sure you've already seen, Harry, Tom is a boy crippled with doubt. He will doubt that he needs you because all his life he has strove to be strong. He will doubt that you love him because he does not deem himself worthy of your love. He will doubt the truth and honesty of every person he comes across, simply because that is the way he chose to live."

"And I have to prove him wrong?"

"Every step of the way, Harry."

Harry was so guilty of failing. He had to… had to show that he didn't hate Tom and wouldn't let his anger get the better of him this time. It wasn't even just about his guilt. Harry had always considered himself sympathetic to other people, and thinking about Tom, now, made his heart threaten to tear in two.

Tom was a Death Eater. He had torn himself apart _and_ was likely insane and everything else. It really wouldn't be easy. But fate always matched two soulmates for a reason, right?

The door opened just then to the man Harry had very much wanted to see.

Lucius Malfoy.

The pale-haired wizard stopped in the doorway, carefully regarding the headmaster and the boy at his desk. "Dumbledore." He drawled. "I wasn't aware that you were handed back your reign of the school."

"Ah, but Lucius," the old man said, "I was requested back within the week."

"Mr Malfoy." Harry butted in. The wizard turned to look at him down his nose, features drawn slightly in distaste. Harry wanted to return the look right back. "I know you owned a little black diary and it caused this entire thing." King of subtlety, it was Harry.

"Pardon me?" the Malfoy asked, still looking slightly disgusted at the sight of Harry. Which was no big surprise, because Harry was a halfblood who hung around with the Weasleys.

"The diary of Tom Marvolo Riddle, from _you_ to Ginny where it possessed her into opening the Chamber of Secrets." Harry had climbed out of his chair and stood with all the defiant height he had. He turned a glare up at Malfoy. "I know you did it, Mr Malfoy. I know she was possessed." Harry was bluffing, really, because Malfoy could've easily lost the diary and Ginny could've picked it up.

He didn't think that was the case, though.

"The boy does have all the memories stored away in his head." Dumbledore commented mildly from behind his desk, "and to think! The Chosen One, openly condemning Lord Malfoy?"

Lucius met Harry's glare and they locked in a silent battle of wills. Well, that Malfoy wasn't openly denying the fact that he owned the diary pretty much confirmed that he had planted it on Ginny, and that strengthened Harry's resolve further. He _would_ get answers from this man.

"Look, I don't want to send my classmate's dad to court or prison," the pureblood looked incensed at Harry's use of 'muggle vocabulary'. "So I'm willing to let you off _if –_ and I'm saying, only _if –_ you tell me _exactly_ where you got that diary."

He had to admit, if his mind wasn't crowded with thoughts of Tom, he would've been raging mad that Lucius Malfoy had essentially nearly killed Ginny.

But now he was determined because Tom _had_ been killed.

Lucius' light grey eyes flickered up to Dumbledore, who was watching the two of them with a slightly disarming smile. Then he looked back at Harry, who stood there like there were stormclouds gathering around him, darkening and roiling with every passing second.

Finally, jerkily, the Malfoy said, "The Dark Lord."

"What?" The gathering thunder around Harry dissipated in an instant as he blinked. Tom must've been a _very_ highly ranked Death Eater, then, if the Dark Lord himself had given a part of Tom to one of his underlings to hold onto.

The grey-eyed man sneered. "Did you not hear? The Dark Lord. He placed it in my care while he had me under his sorcery." His gaze kept flicking up towards Dumbledore. "And I did not know in what way it was cursed or enchanted, so I truly cannot be held accountable for the events that occurred in its presence. I'm afraid the Weasley girl must've _stolen_ it from me–"

Harry bit the side of his mouth to keep from snarling. Yeah _right_ Ginny had 'stolen' it. Lucius Malfoy was a solid bag of lies, and Harry was about to open his gob to tell the man just that, but he was stopped.

"Harry." Dumbledore said, his previous smile now gone. "You've done quite enough." Dumbledore was going to shoosh him right in front of this arrogant arse? Harry was going to complain, but then he was struck by sudden memory of what happened the last time he lost his temper. He slowly sank back down in his seat.

The door burst open, unlike the way Lucius had so casually opened it before. Looking slightly dishevelled, blonde hair in disarray, was Draco Malfoy. His eyes jumped from his father to Harry to all the portraits peering at them on the walls and he seemed to gulp. "Father–" he began, "I was told you were here."

Father eyed son.

"My son." he said icily. "I can only wonder why Mr Potter here was aware of my ownership of several… private artifacts."

Lucius Malfoy was really quite a bit more cleverer than Harry gave him credit for. He watched Draco pale and throw a look at Dumbledore.

"Lucius." Dumbledore suddenly said, with a hint of steel in his tone. "Now, you cannot blame the boy for attempting to warn his _soulmate_ about the dangers of a cursed object and having her explain this to Harry. And, to be fair, Lucius, Harry is not going to file any court case against you. No harm has been done." Harry saw the younger Malfoy's shoulders sag, "Your boy doesn't deserve to be punished for what he's done."

"You don't tell me how to run my household, Dumbledore." Lucius said stiffly, but Harry could tell that his dangerous anger had quietened down. With a few more loaded glances, the two Malfoys left the room after a curt goodbye and Harry relaxed into his chair.

"Professor," Harry sighed, "I've noticed lately that I've started picking up when people lie."

"Is that so, Harry?" Dumbledore hummed, looking unsurprised.

"'Cursed object.'" Harry quoted. "It's not cursed, is it?"

"That was a very minor detail for you to notice, my boy." His eyes sparkled with amusement. "Your Legilimency skills are coming across rather nicely."

"Legilimency?" Harry asked, brow furrowing. He'd heard Hermione mention the term once or twice, maybe, but hadn't delved into it. From what he knew, it was one of the Mind Arts. Why would he have any skills in it? "And not really… Like, it didn't really crop up at all in class, but just then I guess I was paying extra attention."

"It will come to you." Dumbledore reassured him. "Tom was particularly gifted in Legilimency, too." The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled. "I see that the talent comes from the soul."

Harry shifted in his seat slightly awkwardly at the praise. He was never regarded as anything talented. Maybe had a little talent in DADA, so this new skill felt a little like he had stolen it from Tom. "About the lying and stuff…"

"Speak up." his headmaster encouraged.

"Draco knew you'd speak up for him." Harry said slowly, trying to catch Dumbledore's eye for confirmation. "He gave you this look just then when his dad started getting angry."

"I've been in correspondence with Mr Malfoy, Harry, yes. While my students have been petrified around the school, I have not been idling."

Harry blinked. All throughout the year he'd felt somewhat on his own and frustrated along the general public that Dumbledore hadn't put a stop to it all. But apparently the headmaster had been doing things. What would the point of talking to Draco be? Dumbledore must've contacted someone else, too. "Didn't Ginny call for Fawkes? Your pheonix?"

"She did." Dumbledore said.

Harry waited expectantly.

Dumbledore hummed.

"So– uh, you knew she was possessed?" Harry prompted.

"Why of course, my boy! I saw your young Mrs Weasley wandering around one night in the corridors; took her in for a cup of tea; and surrounded by a warm hearth and open ear, her fragile heart could not hold. I _guided_ her, Harry, by informing her to call Fawkes if she were ever in need. Or to cling onto the tail end of possession and use the abilities as her own." Dumbledore's eyes flashed then, and Harry was startlingly reminded that this was the greatest wizard in the whole of Britain. "Why, Tom could never keep secrets from me. I've certainly been prepared for the 'gifts' he's left me."

"Okay," Harry said slowly. He'd have to keep that in mind – the fact that Dumbledore saw and heard practically everything. And that his soulmate had an enmity towards the headmaster, who didn't mind at all. "So you knew this would happen?" he said, the thought dawning. "You knew Ginny would use what _you_ taught her to– to–"

"Harry," his headmaster said. "I cannot see the future." Light fell across the old man's face and he looked weary. Bone-tired. "And I, of all people, am not all-knowing. Experienced, perhaps. But never all-knowing. What little I do know is that I will _not_ stand aside and allow my student to be used, powerlessly, while I could offer her safety and freedom. Of course any man, woman, boy, girl, can be used in life, and sometimes it can be necessary, but _every last one_ deserves a choice. I had to offer Ms Weasley that choice."

Harry was going to complain, but then he imagined what it would've been like to be possessed. Growing gaunter by the day. Mind not your own, blood over your hands because you'd trusted in a stranger, and he couldn't fault Dumbledore for giving Ginny even a bit of power over herself. As much as he hated what had happened down in the chamber, he just couldn't. He couldn't hold onto that hate when he saw Dumbledore here, the tired old man. All of them, just too tired, all good intentions that somehow fell astray.

Harry really did feel tired. "So," a little awkwardly, he cast around for another topic, "is the basilisk dead?"

"Goodness gracious, no." the headmaster said in surprise. "Why would we slay an innocent beast that has been blinded by its cruel masters?" Harry had the sinking feeling that Dumbledore wasn't just talking about the basilisk. The old man chuckled. "And basilisk venom goes for a very large sum, you know. Think about all the new textbooks we could purchase, the brooms… and the Defense Against the Dark Arts professors."

Funnily enough, Harry had forgotten all about Lockhart. "Is he all right, professor?"

"Health wise, yes, although his memory has fallen into a state of disrepair." Harry was fixed with a rather serious look. "Harry – this was not your doing. Lockhart's mistake was his own, and you should not feel the burden of it."

Harry hadn't realised just how much he'd needed to hear that until then.

"Neither was Quirrell's death nor his soulmate's."

Harry froze, his pulse suddenly loud in his ears. Slowly, he relaxed, feeling as though he was drawing nails out of his rigid spine. "Yeah, I know."

"You shouldn't fret, Harry. You are doing terrifically." Dumbledore continued. "You know now that Tom is on the Dark side, closely affiliated with Voldemort himself. You know precisely who your soulmate _is. ..._ It might be time for a break."

Harry knew what the old man was getting at, and the thought left a bitter taste on his tongue. "You think I'm too young to go looking for my soulmate."

"It is not your youth." But he _was_ saying that Harry was too young, anyway. "I ask that you spend some time to stew, Harry. Your search and task requires dedication. It requires thought and devotion – things that take time to incubate – acceptance of your soulmate for who he is. Tom deserves more than a young boy who goes recklessly charging in, powered by nothing but the thought that this is someone he _should_ be saving. Mull the fact that he is a Death Eater. He deserves a soulmate who knows exactly who he is choosing to love."

"So you don't want blind faith." Harry said, flatly.

"Love is always blind." Dumbledore said gently. "A blind man can have purpose. Magnets, Harry. You two will always find each other. You were fated to collide."

Harry didn't how to feel about that, but he did end up telling the professor he'd try stay out of trouble, and that he wouldn't go hounding after Death Eaters while yelling Tom's name.

The old man beamed at him. "Well then!" he said. "I think that's everything cleared up. Now go, Harry, I'm sure your friends are waiting for you."

–––

On the train, Harry was musing aloud to Ron and Hermione, talking about the strange house-elf that had–

"Dobby?" Malfoy asked incredulously from the compartment door where he had just appeared. He glanced back, painted on a sneer, said, "Really, Potter. You ought to get a better imagination. Your prince in shining armor is a _house-elf?_ " A few agreeing snickers were heard from outside.

Then he stepped in, closed the door. Said with skeptical eyes, "Are you aware of the fact that Dobby is my father's house elf?"

A pause. Harry stared. "Uh." (There was a "pah!" of laughter behind him. Ron.) "Then d'you think you could tell me why your house-elf was like, throwing puddings around my aunt's house?"

Malfoy crossed his arms, brows furrowed. "You said he was trying to stop you from going to Hogwarts?" Harry nodded. Malfoy sighed, his hand coming up to rub at his face. "He was probably trying to be traitorous and warn the Boy-Who-Lived before his big bad master put another plot into play."

Hermione was frowning throughout the entire exchange. "... What are house-elves?"

Most of the time, Ron, bless him, just pretended Malfoy wasn't there and leaned past Harry in attempt to look out the windows. It was probably the most peaceful option. "Creatures that live to serve," Malfoy shrugged, taking the conveniently empty chair by his soulmate. Earlier, Harry had to chase out Neville and Ginny from their compartment just so Malfoy could pop in discreetly at this arranged time. "We've got a few at the manor. Hogwarts has hundreds."

"So, servants?"

Malfoy snorted. "Servants are paid. House elves–"

"What?" Hermione asked, suddenly jolting upright, hair seeming to quiver on end. All three boys watched her with mild alarm. "They aren't _paid?_ "

Malfoy blinked slowly, as if uncomprehending her indignance. "They enjoy working."

"They're forced into _slave labour?_ "

"Their pay is the joy of work." Malfoy said patiently. Harry hadn't seen the blond in action (where he didn't immediately just sneer) like this very often, and he could tell by Ron's side glances that he wasn't the only one surprised that Malfoy could actually _have_ patience. "Like studying for something you're interested in."

"But– Draco, that is _slavery!"_

Harry just closed his eyes and hummed to himself, finger trailing along the glass of the window. Hermione and Draco flourished together. But individually...

...

The blonde really was still a prat.

–––

That summer was, hands down, the best Harry had ever experienced. He felt a little twinge each time Petunia told Dudley some lie (which was hilarious, he had to admit.) He got squished birthday cakes. Birthday cards. Support and love from his two great friends. He even got a cordial little card from Malfoy, which he highly suspected Hermione had pestered the miniature aristocrat into writing. He and Malfoy… they were just acquaintances. Obviously they both shared one person in their lives, though they more or less stayed to the opposite ends.

Though Harry realised that they really _did_ have a similarity. Realised it over the summer, baking away in the room, hiding under the sheets, sneaking reading, lying back and thinking about Tom, Tom, Tom.

Both of them had a soulmate on the other side of the war.

Obviously he wasn't going to ask Hermione how she handed it, because she'd pester him about who his soulmate was and he'd eventually cave or she'd go digging. And obviously because Hermione was the goddess of digging, she would probably find out about Tom, who Harry felt that had to be kept secret. Tom, the one who had been about to _kill_ Ginny, the one who had also _been_ killed by the actions of Ginny, Harry, Mr Malfoy, the basilisk, and probably many others.

Well, while Malfoy was on the other side of the war, Malfoy was still a _kid._ He wasn't– wasn't entrenched in the dark arts so far that Lord Voldemort himself had placed part of his soul in another death eater's 'care'. Wasn't buried so deep that he was unconcerned with killing, maiming, living with darkness for so long that he'd shattered and never looked back at the light.

But maybe Malfoy, still, was a step towards 'accepting his soulmate.'

One thing he also thought about was his status as the figurehead of the Light side of the war. The young soul fragment of Tom had obviously been desperate enough to overlook that, but the current Tom already thought he was too strong for soulmates (which clearly wasn't true.) What would happen if Harry approached him? Would he give in? Resist? Would he join the Light side? Maybe he'd help Harry overthrow Voldemort.

The days rolled by in a slow wave, Ron was spending his time in Egypt, Hermione also out of the country, and soon enough, Aunt Marge turned up.

"Runt!"

Harry clutched the edge of the table, his hands growing white. If he didn't do this, they would never let him to go Hogsmeade.

"And his _parents._ Hopeless. Those sorts never breed the good type." She had crumpled, sunken eyes, and a mouth filled with crooked teeth.

Harry couldn't hear over the pounding in his ears. A shout was struggling to burst from his throat. His parents were _good_ people, how _dare she_? She didn't know anything about them. Didn't know anything near the truth, but here she was, waving a gnarled hand dismissively as her mouth moved and spat.

He was a bow pulled taut.

"You can see that dirty blood in this runt." She squinted at him and her eyes were filled with such _dismissal._ As if she had the right– the _right_?

She yelped as her wine glass shattered in her hand. Harry felt a glare sear into his forehead, but he stared at the table. Focus. He just needed to take deep breaths and cool his blood before he actually stabbed Aunt Marge.

"Ah– pressed a little hard." Marge said, as Petunia made a noise of concern. "Happens all the time, broke a mug too the other day. But as I was saying…?"

 _Tom._

His hands stopped shaking. A deadly calm stole over him. Remember what had happened the last time he lost his temper? Remember the boy he'd killed?

"Good-for-nothing. He ought to be grateful you've taken him in, Vernon."

Harry fixed his eyes on her, a cold fire burning in him, and when she glanced at him, she visibly started. Those were haunted eyes. _Empty._

"A-As I was saying, this gravy is absolutely spectacular, Petunia…"

Later, his uncle still refused to sign the form. For the glass, he said. Harry'd have to work to repay that. Too tired to argue, Harry returned to his room and tried not to think about what repercussions he'd face because he'd illegally performed magic in his home. _Again._

The repercussions came a day later in the form of Cornelius Fudge. As soon as he asked to see _Harry,_ who was sitting at the breakfast table, Harry saw Petunia and Dudley's faces pinch. They knew anyone asking for Harry had to be magical business.

A short chat later, after Fudge had perplexingly waved away his instance of magic, asked if Harry had been defending himself or something, if he was alright, "No Death Eaters?", and let him go without even a warning, Harry was left standing, confused, in the doorway.

Dudley poked his head from the kitchen to look at Harry, and sneered, "Got arrested again?"

Harry walked past him, eating his breakfast, clearing his plates and washing the dishes in a bit of a daze. Fudge hadn't cared about his use of magic, but why? He'd been concerned with Harry's safety instead. Obviously that was because Harry was the-Boy-Who-Lived, mascot of the Light – he wasn't allowed to be killed – so it had to be related to Voldemort, didn't it? Fudge wouldn't care about Harry for any lesser things. Then Harry got all sorts of worried. What if Voldemort was back? No, he'd hear from Ron and Hermione if that were the case.

The days continued to lug by, and when Harry owled Malfoy (because his two friends were still overseas) about whether there was some group of Dark Wizards in his area, he got his answer.

(At least it wasn't Tom.)

Sirius Black. Mass murderer. Traitor. Malfoy told Harry everything with little embellishment and quite a bit of snideness. Har har, Malfoy seemed to snicker. I know more about your family and their deaths than _you_ do. Harry couldn't help resent him a little.

Harry's own godfather.

There was a sense of numbness about it. Because while the absence of his parents sometimes faded into the background, like an old wound, this was a new, raw, injury. It was real. The horror of Voldemort had been real. His parents, their friends and their lives…

There was a serial killer hunting Harry. He could only hope that _he'd_ find Black before Black found him.


	5. book 3 cont

a/n (im gonna call total bollocks on the fact that no one noticed their _brother was sleeping with a mysterious name every night **.**_ a name that, in canon, Ron recognised as one of the victims of Sirius Black. Rowling said, in regards to this plot hole, that the weasleys wouldn't have recognised the name so it didn't matter. but _Ron_ did, so why wouldn't his brothers? even if they didn't, it's suspicious enough that there's a _person in their brother's bed._ scabbers sleeps in ron's dormitory. we know that. in addition: the twins would've played pranks on the people in their own dorm, so they would've looked at the map during those times. esp. pranks on their own brother. so why did they never notice?) but yeah 'm gonna run w/ this plot hole anyway 'cause it'd break everything otherwise.

i hate malfoy goddamnit get _out of my story stop stealing harry's thunder_

also, check that you didn't skip a chapter :)

* * *

He recognised his mother's voice immediately.

Harry was still reeling from the embarrassment of fainting at the sight of a Dementor when was he was released from the Hospital Wing. Still reeling when Malfoy laughed at him and said he was a pansy. He knew it was just supposed to be a jibe, that Malfoy couldn't have know what Harry was really hearing, but when he flinched, looked up, and caught the slightest glint of mirth in those grey eyes, it hit him. The truth was that Malfoy actually _did_ enjoy talking shit. It wasn't just a 'joke.' It wasn't 'for show.'

Harry saw that truth, and just absolutely, absolutely, had _enough._

Putting up with appearances, letting Malfoy 'pretend' to antagonise him for Hermione's sake – Harry was absolutely done. He was so _done_ taking shit from people. Dudley. Malfoy. Aunt Marge. He thought he and Malfoy could've actually become friends.

When Malfoy broke off with his cronies to go to the bathroom, Harry stalked him like a dark mist. Then he slammed into the other boy and threw him into an empty classroom, sending him skidding across the floor. The door smashed shut behind him. Malfoy turned around, saw Harry, eyes widened, and he said, "Are you unhinged?"

"No." Harry said lowly. His wand was drawn. "But I'm starting to wonder if _you_ are."

"Me? What on earth has gotten into you, Potter–"

Harry exploded. "You bloody _like_ doing it, don't you?! All this time! Does Hermione even mean _anything to you?_ " Harry yelled, slamming a hand on a desk, sending dust flying. "All of that– you _lied_ to her! That's just who you are, isn't it, Malfoy?! She could never get that _rotten_ core from you – the only love you've got is for _spitting_ on people!"

Malfoy had gone terribly pale, but he'd pulled out his wand and had it aimed at Harry between white fingers.

"Want to know what I heard, Malfoy? My _**mother dying**_! I heard her begging for her _life_! You want to laugh, Malfoy? You want to keep laughing at how my parents are _dead_ and I'm stuck with people who treat me like a _slave,_ who never let me learn magic or have friends and force me to scrub their floors? Go _on_ , Malfoy! Laugh! _Laugh!_ "

His words echoed the distance between them.

"You're right." Malfoy said blankly, eyes staring nowhere. "You're right."

His wand clattered to the floor.

"I'm _shit._ "

Harry felt a twinge of doubt.

"I don't deserve her at all." he spat. "I spend my days looking for– _validation_. So much that I can't stop even for my _soulmate._ "

(Validation that he's not weak. Just like _Tom.)_

"Aren't you just glad you don't have a _friend_ like _me?_ "

Harry would spare a heart for Tom. ...He would spare a heart for the other children of the Dark, too; for the validation he suspected Malfoy had never got, not once in his lifetime, who was forced to scrounge for scraps in the corridors through bullying and posturing and a reign of self-agony. Hadn't Dumbledore been talking to Malfoy last year, too? Dumbledore must've given Malfoy a chance. Harry should've, too.

He scrambled for his words. For his mistake. "No."

"No?" Malfoy looked up at him, grey eyes suddenly sharpening.

"I'm–" Harry cleared his throat. "You should be glad you don't have a friend like _me,_ who stupidly yells at people all the time and hurts their feelings."

Malfoy stared at him for a moment. Then he snorted in a sort of half-laugh. "My feelings are not _hurt._ " He finally said, imperiously.

"Look, Malfoy... you'll be good for Hermione." Harry said, leaning against a wall and sliding down, so he was on level with the other boy. "You know what you're doing wrong. You feel regret. You _try_ for her. You…" really do love her, he wanted to say, but his throat closed up and he couldn't speak anymore.

Malfoy tilted his head and tried to meet Harry's eyes. But Harry looked away. "Can't talk about love?" His eyes flashed, like those of a fox in the night. "Ah. You found out who your soulmate was, didn't you? And you don't think they'll feel regret for you or try for you." Or love you.

Harry said nothing. But the Slytherin knew.

"Is that why _my_ jokes really get to you? You can take laughter from muggles, other Slytherins, but not the one who also has a soulmate on the other side of the war? Someone 'like you'?"

"No." Harry said. Malfoy snorted again. Harry wondered if Malfoy had Legilimency skills, too. He vaguely recalled Hermione mentioning it. "That's got nothing to do with it."

"Oh, don't _lie_ to me." Malfoy scoffed, his usual snobbish demeanour quickly reforming, as if Harry's shouting had never happened.

Harry stared back at him. "Are you using Legilimency on me?"

"It doesn't work like that, you idiot. You'd know if I was."

"Really?" Harry knew, could feel it, that Malfoy wasn't lying. But he remembered those little twinges he'd felt when Petunia or Vernon said something, or that once with Dumbledore. "Not for me."

"Oh bloody wonder," Malfoy groaned. "Of course the little Boy-Who-Lived has some _more_ magical talents."

–––

He'd managed to coax Malfoy into giving him Legilimency lessons, although he suspected that the little blond was actually quite curious about Harry's skills. And willing to laugh at Harry's abysmal use of them. At least it'd offer another outlet for Malfoy. Harry could take mocking about skills Malfoy was actually better at, but not jeers about his status or blood type or whatever else was actually offensive and not truthful.

(Who knew, it might even encourage his studies.)

Their first session was, quite terrifyingly, abysmal. They sat in one of the old Defense Against the Dark Arts classrooms, with a rather awkward air, as Malfoy explained there were many different ways people chose to use their skills. Offensively, or defensively. (Learning the Mind Arts was illegal. Imagine what would've happened if Malfoy went and ratted Harry out to the papers. Well. Hermione would absolutely _ream_ Malfoy, for sure.)

Malfoy tested Harry's Occlumency skills first, heard Lily screaming, and emerged pale-faced and suggesting they tried Harry's Legilimency instead.

Of course Harry had to be standing there, the incantation on his lips and on hair trigger, his wand pointed at Malfoy, when the door opened. And of course Harry whipped around so quickly that he ended up sending the spell at the intruder.

"Oh, sorry, I was just trying to look for–"

It really had to be Professor Lupin.

 _A tall boy with black hair, looking just like Harry, but his eyes – not green – they were–_

Harry pulled out as soon as he realised it was his _professor,_ who was standing staring with surprised eyes. "Were you two trying to duel in here?" He asked.

"Um," Harry began, hastily stuffing his wand away. "Of course not, sir."

Even Malfoy had the decency to look abashed.

"At least, we weren't, _yet_." Harry said, to make the story more plausible. Lupin sighed and shook his head.

"Harry, Draco, I'm not going to press you for what you were doing, but please try not to break into more classrooms in the future."

"Yes, sir." They both said meekly, before escaping out the door. Malfoy never asked Harry what he'd seen.

–––

It seemed like every third-year student was leaving to Hogsmeade except Harry. They laughed with each other, a whole sea of hustle and bustle, and made for the doors of the Great Hall. Harry was still at the breakfast table, eating alone as he watched this friends go. They kept casting guilty looks at him. Something about bringing things back for him or staying with him next time.

Someone shrieked in the crowd. It wasn't a terrified shriek, but one that was bursting with elation. Harry looked over, and he saw a very many heads also turn to the source of the shout, where there was a black-haired girl absolutely _beaming_ as a boy stared at her, wide-eyed.

Then the people around them began to cheer. "Cho!" they yelled. "It was Cedric?!"

The girl looked close to tears, nodding in response to her friends as she met the eyes of the boy in front of her.

They must have brushed hands in the crowd. Then _felt_ it, the feeling of meeting your soulmate for the first time.

Harry abandoned his breakfast and left.

–––

Sirius Black slashed up the Gryffindor tower and when Harry was standing there, gesturing with his hands as he said to Hermione and Ron: "We've got to find some way to catch him. He was my father's friend _,_ and a _traitor_ –!" His mind froze.

His _father._

–––

Why did the improvement of his Legilimency skills do nothing to make the words on his hands more coherent? Did this mean that Harry's Occlumency skills would have no effect in disguising his thoughts, either?

Those were idle thoughts in his mind. His primary focus was, actually, finding and talking to Professor Lupin. He knew were Lupin's office was – courtesy of the Marauder's map that he'd been gifted (he decided not to go to Hogsmeade, because right then lying back and enjoying himself was the last thing he needed) – and soon he was invited in for a seat. "Harry," Professor Lupin said, standing by his desk and packing his quills and papers into neat bundles. "What did you want to ask? Did you find the lesson difficult?"

"No, your classes are great. I wanted to ask… did you know my dad?" Did you know that black-haired boy I saw in your memories, when you looked at me?

Lupin paused. "Yes, in fact, I did. Who told you that?"

Harry had prepared an answer. "Hagrid. Does that mean you knew Sirius Black, too?"

The heap in Lupin's hands went clattering to the floor, an ink jar _thud_ ding as its lid popped off.

"I did." Lupin said shortly, not making a move to pick any of it up, even as ink began to ooze. Harry stood from his chair, instead, and started towards the mess on the floor. "You don't need to do that, Harry. And you don't need to go trying to find Sirius Black, either."

"I'm a person of action." Harry said, scooping quills into his hands. "And most of the time Dumbledore wants me to solve things on my own, anyway. He helped me along the way with Quirrell and things."

"He… He does what? That's awfully dangerous." When Harry looked up, he saw that Lupin's eyebrows were knitted together in concern. "I ought to talk to him."

"No," Harry said. "It's good for me."

" _Harry,_ you were eleven. Twelve, still only thirteen now. You must be misinterpreting his intentions. Dumbledore wouldn't put a thirteen-year-old in such danger."

"He's training me to be alert. To use my head, to find my skills." Harry stood, placing a bundle of quills on the desk. "In a roundabout sort of way."

"Surely there are less dangerous ways to train–"

"I've always been in danger," Harry said gently, "since I was born. Isn't Sirius Black proof of that? And of course I need training. I'm the mascot for the Light."

Lupin really looked at him then, as if seeing him for the first time, and Harry saw _him_ for the first time, too. Someone tired and weary with the world, who hadn't seen enough candles to light his way through life. "If only James could see you now…" The mention of his father sent a sharp pang through Harry's heart. If only. "He would be so proud that you were so brave, so happy that you were clever, and absolutely brimming with laughter that you're as much as a mischief maker and risk taker as he was."

The sunlight in the room seemed to dim, the shadows close in, and the absence of his family harrower. Lily and James.

Harry had seen Lupin's hands a few times and the chicken-scratch of handwriting that had crossed them. Most of the time they were curse words, which was absolutely hilarious, because Professor Lupin didn't look like he'd curse at all. But Lupin had taken some days off sick now and then, and he always looked drawn and pale, yet Harry had never seen his soulmate around to support him. Standing there in Lupin's office, he couldn't see any sort of photos of a wife or children, either. The other teachers all had little photo frames on their desks even in their teaching classes.

Lupin was old, and he was tired and alone. But Harry saw words cross his hands. _I can't believe someone just left this lying around!_ They read in a spiky scrawl. _Just you fucking wait, Peter!_ Who was Lupin's soulmate, who never went back to her other half? _I'll hunt you down._

"Can you tell me about my dad?" Harry asked. Lupin brightened.

"Of course I can. Anything you want." he said, waving his wand and watching as the ink _unspilled_ out of the carpet.

"Actually… first, do you think you can you teach me how to stop Dementors from affecting me so much?"

–––

"Why…" Harry began, "wait, the Ministry keeps a record of everyone's soulmates, right?" He couldn't get his mind off the criminal running around the castle. The criminal who was the reason why he parents had died. Black occupied most of his mind, except that little corner that kept thinking about the huge black dog he kept seeing.

"In a way." Hermione said from behind a book at her favourite armchair. "Most people give the name of their soulmate when they go and work for the Ministry, or any sort of job."

"Do they have criminals' soulmates?"

Hermione slowly lowered her book. Ron, who had fallen asleep in front of the fire, stirred. "Oh my god, Harry."

"What?"

"You're a genius!" she exclaimed, jumping out of her chair and dashing towards the girl's dormitories. "Just wait, let me get something!" She returned a moment later, a startlingly heavy book in her hands that she was scanning as she hurried. "Records– ahah! They _do,_ so they know who to keep track of in case they try to break their soulmate out of Azkaban!"

"So if we find out who Sirius Black's soulmate is–"

"We can find him!" Hermione finished for him, smiling widely.

"Aren't they private, though?"

Hermione's smile grew wider. "I have Draco."

Harry paused. "I forgot about that. How do I even _forget_ the power his dad has in the Ministry?" He asked himself.

"You know, Harry, actually, Draco told me he's been giving you Legilimency lessons." Harry's heart stopped, because he hadn't told any of his friends. It was illegal, and he really didn't want Ron to, say, accidentally spill the beans. Or for Ron to even just _talk_ to him about it and have someone overhear. (He guessed that Hermione was hiding something these days, too. With what like disappearing in thing air, and such) More importantly – what if Hermione knew about his soulmate, too?

"What? Why?"

"Because his Legilimency," she looked around, checking that the general bustle of the common room covered up their conversation, "is getting better, and he popped into my dream the other time and I was _very_ surprised."

Harry stared. "You can _do_ that?"

"You can do anything with magic! Except bring people back from the dead, or make food or money, or–"

Ron chose that moment to wake back up, opening his eyes groggily and saying, "Eh? What are you two so excited 'bout…"

Harry grinned at his friend. "We're going to find Sirius Black!"

–––

It really was stupid of Harry. Why, in the light of their soon-to-be-successes, did he sneak out for a Butterbeer? And why did _Snape_ just have to catch him under the cloak? Harry had been sitting at the table (which, in hindsight, was stupid. He should've crouched underneath it,) and the big bat must've seen the indent in the cushions.

Before he knew it, he was being dragged away and reprimanded. Snape stuck in hands into Harry's pockets and wrenched out the Marauder's map.

And then it was gone, and he wouldn't be sneaking out again for a long while.

–––

Draco was laughing when they met for the Legilimency session. He was laughing so hard that he had to double over and clutch at a desk. "Ah," he said, wiping at his eyes. Harry just stared at the odd display. "Is Hermione here yet? Or your churlish friend, Ron?"

"Ron is not _churlish._ " Harry protested. He didn't know what the word meant, but it sounded like an insult.

" _Legilimens!_ "

"Argh!" _He didn't know what the word meant–_ And then Malfoy's presence in his mind was gone. (Malfoy never liked to linger, in case he stumbled across things like Harry killing Voldemort, or Harry being bullied by muggles, or Harry's mother being murdered… )

"Crabbe and Goyle are churlish." Malfoy said smugly. "Ron is churlish. 'Rude', in your simple terms. And your Occlumency is still appalling." Especially in comparison to his Legilimency.

Harry threw his hands up in exasperation. "Maybe you're just a rubbish tutor!"

The door opened and a bushel of brown hair peeked in. "Is this the right room?"

"Hermione." Draco said, suddenly looking like he wanted to laugh, again. "Do you happen to have a foul-tasting plant behind you?"

"A… plant?" she asked, stepping in, followed by Ron.

"A ginger." Ron muttered, glaring. Harry, traitorously, snorted in laughter.

"Did you find Black's soulmate?" Hermione asked instead, choosing to make no comment on the jab.

Malfoy nodded. All eyes snapped to him. "Well," he drawled, "the Ministry already contacted him–"

" _Him?"_ Ron exclaimed. "Sirius Black, serial killer, mass murderer, is a _poof?_ No _–_ "

"–and he says that what Black's thinking doesn't make sense; Azkaban's driven him nutters."

"Ron," Harry said, trying to keep his voice as neutral as he could while his own mind whirled. "Shut up."

Malfoy's grin grew predatory, his blonde hair glinting eerily white in the dim classroom. Harry though he looked like a ghost. Or a demon. "At least, that's what Remus Lupin told the Ministry." Then he began to laugh.

Harry saw a myriad of expressions cross Ron's face, one of them disgust. He saw Hermione's shock, and he– well, he really hadn't been expecting the revelation, either. Of course it was Lupin. _Of course._ How didn't he see it earlier? Lupin, whose soulmate was never there for him, who had no photos of a happy couple. Who had been best friends with Sirius Black in Hogwarts.

"I guess, out of all men, it would've been Lupin." he said tightly. "They were close friends, after–"

"What?!" Ron cut in. "How could you have 'thought so'? You just _thought_ Black was a _poof_ and that he _happened_ to be shagging our DADA teacher? Look, I _knew_ there was something wrong with Lupin too, but I could've never guessed–"

Halfway through Ron's sentence, Harry strode right across the room, each step taken with deadly intent, raised his hand which was already curled into a fist, and sunk it straight into his friend's face. It connected with a sickening _crunch._

Hermione yelled something. Then Harry was being dragged away by a pair of hands. "How _dare_ you!" Harry hissed as he struggled. "How _dare you!_ He was one of my father's best friends! _Both_ of them were!"

Ron stared at him, face pale, blood running from his nose.

The corridor was startlingly bright, and he could hardly hear Hermione through the rage of his thoughts. Couldn't hear, couldn't see through the red until he was shoved all the way back into the boy's dormitories and realised Ron didn't come back to the tower that night.

–––

There was a shuffling. The sound of things being thrown and _riiiiiiip._ Like there was a miniature storm next door, growing and whirling faster and faster in the dark.

Harry sat up in bed, abruptly, like some equilibrium had been displaced, like there was some disaster occurring. A distant shattering. Something–

 _Bang!_

The sound was so close that Harry jumped. Some _thing_ was moving right outside his curtain. He couldn't imagine what it could be. Except... Sirius Black. Which meant he was there to murder Harry.

He gripped his wand tightly, and then a memory flashed in his mind. _Just you fucking wait, Peter! I'll hunt you down._ It had been written on Lupin's hand. He had a lot of questions for Black. About why he betrayed Harry's parents.

He also had to have a lot of luck that he didn't get murdered.

With that, he flung open the curtain, and froze in complete, seizing shock. The room was in ruins. Feathers drifted downwards from a torn pillow, Ron's mattress was slashed and flipped and all of his belongings were strewn everywhere as though they had been gutted and then left for crows. The perpetrator perched at the foot of Ron's bed, facing away from Harry so he could only see stringy matted hair, knife glinting in his hand like bone.

"Where _is_ he? I'll fucking kill him!" Harry heard Black growl, gravelly and shredded. Moonlight filtered in through the thin curtains and what little Harry could see of Black's skin was pale as stone. A gargoyle.

Ron's slashed bed. Ron's slashed belongings. None of the other beds had been touched. Harry's mind churned. Black, inexplicably, was trying to kill _Ron._ But wasn't he looking for Peter? Harry must've misinterpreted the thoughts–

Black turned and Harry caught a sight of his face. Sallow, sharp, but in that one instant where they locked gazes, Harry saw the _intelligence_ behind those dark eyes.

Black knew exactly what he was doing. He lucid, and dangerous.

"Hey, Harry." he said suddenly, mouth twisting into a grim smirk. His scratchy voice froze Harry in place. "Tell Lupin I love him, will you? And, since he hasn't gotten it yet, tell him Peter's not dead – think about what illegal things we used to do." His voice was hoarse, but devoid of mocking. It was earnest. The situation was _obscene_ , here, in a room bathed with twilight, a murderer was talking to Harry about– about– _what_ _?_

Then the man leapt off the bed in a movement like creaky hinges folding and unfolding and disappeared out the door. Harry was on his feet in seconds, his heart hammering away as he thought of his friend sleeping somewhere outside because he was too angry or too ashamed to come back to face Harry.

Also, _what in Merlin's bloody arse_ had Black meant when he said that? Harry's world was being torn out from the roots and flipped inside out. He was too confused to process exactly what was happening.

What he did manage to register was that Sirius Black must've been looking for Ron. Ron was going to die and it'd be Harry's fault. His head pounded – how did he always get people killed? If only he still had the Marauder's map. Instead, he snagged the Cloak and slinked out of the dormitory, alert and watching, but saw no sign of Sirius Black. He swung open the portrait door– and stepped onto something decidedly warm. Was that a _body?_

"Ah!" he yelped, and was greeted with the sniffling face of Neville Longbottom.

"Harry! Who came out just then? They rushed past and woke me up." Neville cried, scrambling to his feet where he'd been curled up right outside the portrait hole. "I–I lost my list with the passwords on it, and I couldn't get back in!"

Harry's heart dropped to his stomach. Oh, Neville. Oh poor, poor, Neville. "Get back in," he said. "I need to go look for Ron."

"Ron?" Neville asked tearfully, looking around the dark corridor as if Sirius Black would leap out at any moment. "But– Black's out there, Harry!"

"I don't know why, but he's after Ron." Harry said firmly. "I've got to go find him." Maybe he could break into Snape's and use the map or something…

"Just tell the teachers, Harry! They can look for him!"

"There's no time for that." Harry replied.

"There's no time to be looking through the whole castle!" Neville did have a point, Harry thought. And wouldn't the teachers be patrolling the corridors at this time? They were all on high alert, there'd be no sneaking around them, and they'd be able to help. It wasn't as though Harry was breaking the rules this time.

"All right. Go back inside. I'll find one of the teachers!" He said, and then he dashed down the corridor.

Harry ran down the winding hallways, skidded up stairwells, spotted a tell-tale bun, and mentally groaned. He shouted, voice carrying. Then his Head of House turned around with an expression so thunderous Harry froze in place.

"Harry _Potter!"_ she said, nostrils flaring dangerously white, striding over to him in a sweep. She loomed and Harry swore her cloak made a Snape-worthy flutter. "What do you _think_ you're doing, wandering the corridors at night when there is a _murderer–"_

"Sirius Black was in the Gryffindor tower." Harry blurted, looking up at her. "He was– he was _in our dorm,_ and he tore up Ron's bed and then he left, but he was muttering about looking for someone and killing them, and I don't know where Ron is but–"

"How did Black get in?" McGonagall demanded.

It was easier if Harry told her now. She's let her anger out now. She'd find out anyway, and Harry would really rather not watch her eviscerate Neville in front of everybody. "Neville lost a list of his passwords." he said.

His professor _hissed,_ her features contorting to look positively eagle-like _._ She flicked her wand and a white burst that Harry recognised as a patronus leapt into the corridor. "Black's in the castle. Find Ronald Weasley. Black might be after him." she said curtly. The patronus – which was a cat – immediately ran off. "Now, Harry, _return_ _to your dorm._ "

"But–"

"There will be no protests." she said sternly. "Go."

He went.

When he flopped back onto his bed, he heard an indignant squeak. Was that Scabbers? "Scabbers?" He whispered, and saw that the rat was under _his_ pillow _._ Merlin. When had it gotten there? "Ron isn't here." he said to the rat. "Go sleep in the stuffing of his bed or something."

Scabbers squeaked again, then darted away.

–––

The bright new morning was marred with a crowd of Gryffindors in the common room whispering to each other and casting furtive looks at Neville, who was in the corner, sniffling. Harry hadn't gotten a wink of sleep after the incident and was still high strung, thinking of where Ron could be, while shuffling, bleary-eyed, down the staircase.

"'ey, hey, Harry!" someone called. "McGonagall just made an announcement; is it true that Longbottom let Black in?" He could feel heads turn to him, expectantly.

Harry just nodded. Then the noise started up again and the wide berth around Neville grew even larger. Shame dripped from the boy's face.

Oh, Harry was just sick of this. "Leave him alone." he said, loudly. Most people stopped to look at him. "If Black didn't get the password from Neville, he might've taken one of you instead and tortured you until you gave him the password. At least no one got hurt, okay? Just leave him alone." No one looked very convinced, so Harry just left through the portrait-hole. He had to find Ron.

It swung open and there McGonagall was, giving his red-haired friend a stern talking. "–I expect to see you washing out the teacups in your Divination professor's classroom." Ron, uncharacteristically, was looking cowed. Then he caught sight of Harry and his eyes widened.

"Yes, Professor." Ron said. With one last sharp look, McGonagall swept away, leaving Harry and Ron staring at each other rather awkwardly. "Look, mate," Ron began, looking nervous, "can we go somewhere to talk for a second?"

Harry didn't say anything, but he stepped out into the corridor and let his friend lead him away. He didn't trust his mouth right then. "I–I'm sorry, okay? I shouldn't have called Lupin that." Ron began, wringing his hands. "It's just– it's _weird_ to me, you know? It's not like I see poofs all the time – Fred and George are a different thing. A–And when I said there was something wrong with Lupin… I meant the way he's always away and stuff, not that he's… gay, right? Just that there had to be something shady with his soulmate. Like, criminal shady."

His black-haired friend looked at him and sighed. "Ron, look, you're my best friend," something in his tone must've given him away because the other boy looked up with hopeful eyes, "well, Hermione is too, but… I might've overreacted yesterday." He couldn't be too touchy about it. In case Ron or Hermione suspected the gender of his soulmate. That'd probably go down far worse. So he pretended the statement Ron'd made wasn't as hurtful as it had been. "I'm sorry for hitting you. I really am. I'm your best friend... I should never hit you. And it's all alright, what you said about Lupin, because you _are_ trying to change your mind on gay people."

"I deserved to be hit a bit, to be honest." Ron said, looking down at his feet. "Just give me some time to adjust, yeah?"

Harry smiled. "Yeah. We're good?"

His best friend grinned back at him.

–––

It was the weekend, and all the other students went to Hogsmeade. "Sorry, Harry, we'll bring things back for you," they said again. "Or I'll try to," Seamus muttered, because he was usually the one who smuggled back all the sweets, although he'd managed to misplace his wand that morning. Meanwhile, Harry went knocking on Professor Lupin's door. He was still intent on finding Sirius Black, and there were still many mysteries about the man. What was his goal – why _Ron?_ How did he escape from Azkaban? How did he sneak into Hogwarts? And Black had actually said 'Peter's not dead – think about what illegal things we used to do.' Big clue. But who was Peter? Harry had definitely heard the name before, but he couldn't quite remember...

So apparently these 'illegal things' were the key to some of Harry's questions. He could just ask Lupin, straight up. But what if Lupin's eyes just widened in understanding and he never told Harry? Or just lied to Harry?

"Professor?"

The door opened, and Lupin looked out. The man looked weary, with more grey hairs than he deserved, and his eyes lacking shine. "Harry?"

"Could I come in? No one else's in the castle, and I didn't think you'd be too busy…?" Harry said, poised as if to leave if Lupin thought he was an inconvenience.

"Oh, no, no. Harry, you're always welcome to visit me. Do you want a cup of tea?"

Harry's wispy patronus was a good as could be, an achievement enough already, so the conversation inevitably turned to Lupin's Hogwarts days. Lupin told Harry about Snape, even. Snape, who'd believed Lily was his soulmate and that he'd just happened to have missed the 'spark' the first time they'd touched, and was too shy to ask. He'd only been mistaken for a year, but James would never let him live it down.

Now that Harry was watching, he could see the lingering sadness whenever Lupin mentioned Sirius during their escapades. A momentary whimsical flicker. But mostly the sadness: the sadness that his soulmate had turned to murder.

It also turned out that they had been the Marauders. Harry mentioned the map and the four founders, and asked who was who.

"James was Prongs, Sirius was Padfoot, Peter was Wormtail, and I was Moony." Lupin said with a smile, remembering.

"Why the names?" Harry really did want to know everything about his father that he could. The man who was always there but not. Who always influenced Harry's life, but was never in it.

Lupin shifted in his seat. "They represented animals we liked. A stag, a dog, a werewolf, and a rat. We thought we'd each pick an animal and run with them. The lion was excluded, of course." Harry didn't even need his innate, passive Legilimency's nudging in his mind to tell him that Lupin was lying about something.

"Peter wanted to be a rat?" Harry asked, trying to nudge Lupin into revealing more of the truth. He had remembered Peter as soon as Lupin had mentioned his last name earlier. The man who Ron had told Harry had been killed by Black. Peter, who Black was looking for, who Black said wasn't dead. No wonder they thought Sirius Black was delusional. Peter Pettigrew was killed in front of witnesses! ...But Sirius Black _couldn't_ be mad. He was too clear, too calculated for that. None of his other actions pointed towards insanity.

Lupin shifted again, his fingers fiddling against his teacup. "He said they were unappreciated, so yes, he chose a rat as his favourite." He was lying. Again.

Harry _did_ like Lupin. Lupin was a generous, earnest, person. When he told Harry that he was always welcome for tea, Harry couldn't sense any lies. Lupin had also helped him out the first day on the train and was actually a competent teacher. He was a good man, and Harry regretted what he'd have to do to him.

"Do you think you could convince Snape to give the map back so we could see if Black appears on it?"

"That's a brilliant idea, Harry, except I doubt Severus would approve… with his grudge against me."

"He hates my dad because my dad was an enormous bully. He doesn't hate you _._ Why would he? I guess if he really did, I could always ask Dumbledore, instead."

"He does loathe me, too." Lupin said. Lie-free. "He doesn't approve of me teaching here, not with my lifestyle." The man looked around at his office for a moment, where everything was homely and a set of well-worn robes hung off the back of the door.

"Because you're poor?" Harry asked in disbelief.

Lupin hesitated. "Something like that." Harry's magic tugged at him again, his Legilimency nudging at him. So _Snape_ was in on it, too. Which made sense, because Snape was around during the Marauder years, and Black did say that they did something illegal in the past. Snape might have witnessed and known it.

Oh, balls to the subtlety. Harry couldn't dance around the subject like other people did. So he resorted to something incredibly rude and reckless. Went in just for the kill. He leaned forwards from where he was seated, placing his teacup on the table between the two of them. "Your soulmate's looking for Peter Pettigrew, isn't he."

Tea splashed onto the carpet as Lupin jolted. His eyes were blown wide, face a mask of vulnerability. "How–"

"He sends his love, by the way." Harry said calmly, even though he was giddy inside. "And I think he's a bit offended you all think he's mad, because he's sure Peter is alive." He paused. "Apparently you still haven't realised the truth, and it's got something to do with whatever you used to illegally do."

Harry couldn't have imaged Lupin any more pale. "He–He told you this?"

"Yes." Harry said. "We sat down and had a cup of tea together."

Lupin's elbows hit the table, and he stared at the wood, head between his hands. "I don't see how it's relevant."

"What is it?" Harry asked. "What did you two used to do?"

He could _see_ Lupin hesitate.

"Black killed my parents." Harry said quietly. "I know he betrayed them. I'm not going to leave until I know why and how he's free."

"...Don't you all wonder why I'm always ill?" Lupin finally asked, wearily. He looked defeated. "I'm a werewolf."

Oh.

"You're a werewolf." Harry repeated. So that was the 'lifestyle' Snape hated. He was struck suddenly by another idea. "They overlooked that and wanted you to teach here because they wanted you to look for Sirius Black, didn't they?"

"No," Lupin said. "Dumbledore genuinely only wanted me to teach." Harry wasn't sure if he believed that. Dumbledore never 'only' did something; the old man was talented at setting people up for a chain of events. "But it makes no sense. Sirius, James and Peter used to smuggle me out on full moons, but there's no relevance to Sirius' escape."

"You used secret passages?"

Lupin nodded.

"Then Black's obviously using those." But it still didn't answer the question. "That's all you did? Smuggle you out, and leave you there for a whole night?" No other illegal illicit activities? They didn't learn how to teleport wandlessly?

"Some of the teachers knew." Lupin said miserably. "They encouraged the ghost stories about the Shrieking Shack."

 _He didn't answer the question._

"There's more, isn't there." Harry said abruptly.

Lupin stared at his teacup. "It's not a petty, minor crime." he said. "I'd go to Azkaban if it got out."

"I wouldn't send you to Azkaban."

"Some of the teachers here read the minds of their students regularly."

Harry grinned, and it was disconcertingly close to a smirk. Smirking wasn't an expression he thought he'd ever wear. "Professor," he said. "But you see… I'm not exactly defenceless." He only caught a flash of Lupin's shocked eyes before he pointed his wand at the man and said, clearly, " _Legilimens."_

 _–Animagi. A great black dog, a regal stag, a small scruffy wolf and an oddly familiar rat–_

Harry resurfaced with a gasp. " _Scabbers!"_ he said, but it couldn't be. And that dog, the one he'd seen all throughout the year… "My _God._ "

"... You can use Legilimency _._ " Lupin said. "I cannot believe you used it on _me._ Merlin, Harry, you conflict me–"

"You four were unregistered _animagi._ " Harry said, his mouth moving on its own. "I knew it! Sirius Black isn't insane because _Peter Pettigrew **is** actually alive!_ "

Lupin froze. "Pardon?"

"Peter is alive." Harry repeated. "He's my friend's rat, and he's the one Sirius wants to kill."

–––

After facing one teacher, Harry felt confident enough to stand up to another.

He'd left Lupin in a state of shell-shock. The man still needed time to process, apparently, that Harry could use Legilimency and also that Peter was alive. But most of all, that his soulmate was actually sane. Lupin said he'd contact Harry later, once he managed to get in touch with his soulmate and got more answers.

In the meantime, Harry was standing, terrified, in front of Snape's door. He mustered up his courage and knocked.

A pregnant pause.

It opened too suddenly, and Harry was faced with his most dreaded teacher. There was a thick smell of _something_ bitter that wafted out the door. "Professor Snape," Harry said, because Snape didn't look like he wanted to greet Harry at all. "Do you, uh, think I could have my piece of parchment back?"

"Your piece of parchment." Snape repeated drily. Harry swallowed.

"Yes, I– uh– it makes jokes because I was using it as a part of one of my projects for charms."

Snape's eyes narrowed so that he looked even more predatory, as though gauging up Harry's worth. "Unfortunately," he drawled. "It seems that your little _parchment_ went missing a few days ago."

Harry's heart stopped. Seriously?

"I must've mistaken it for trash and tossed it away." Snape said coolly, "My apologies." Then he shut the door in Harry's face.

–––

A tail brushed against his leg just as he was about to climb through the portrait-hole. "Hey, Crookshanks." He said a little miserably, giving the cat a scratch. "I think we're on the same agenda tonight. Let's just hope Peter is up by Ron's bed."

Ron and Hermione were in the common room, and Harry waved to them. Crookshanks, in the meantime, dashed past and towards the boy's dormitory. The door to their room was always open, which was probably how Crookshanks kept getting in.

A certain red-head honed onto the cat in an instant.

" _Stop_ your stupid cat from killing my rat _!_ " he shouted and threw himself after Hermione's pet. Heads turned; the cat bolted past, though, right through Ron's hands and towards the boy's dormitory. Harry ran after the two of them and met them on the stairs, where Ron had managed to get hold of Crookshank's tail.

"Argh– stupid– damn– cat!" There was a hiss in reply and three angry claw marks appeared on Ron's arm.

"Ron, just let him go!" Harry said. His friend gave him an incredulous look. "I'll explain everything later, Scabbers isn't what you think he is, just, please–"

Their dormitory door slammed shut. Their heads both jerked up towards the noise. Crookshanks slipped out of Ron's grip, crashed into the door, and began to yowl.

"Dean, Neville and Seamus are all downstairs." Ron said slowly. "I was playing Snap with them ten minutes ago!"

Harry fought the urge to swear, then he tried the handle. "Oh no, oh no, bloody hell." He muttered _alohomora,_ but the thing refused to budge. "Hermione!" he yelled.

"I'm already here," she said, appearing behind them, "obviously, because Crookshanks–"

"Can you open our door?" Harry asked. Hermione frowned.

"Sometimes we all hate Blagdon Blay." she muttered, and they watched her wand move and heard the door click open. "Now, why–"

Harry threw the thing open just as he heard glass shatter.

There was a person who looked like a vulture perched on one of the window sills. He was a stubby sort of man, the type whose neck had shrunken back, whose eyes were perpetually squinted and beady, and whose hair was matted with sweat and filth. In his knobby hands, one of which was missing a finger, he gripped a wand and a piece of parchment Harry recognised as the Marauder's Map. Shattered glass lay across the floor and the wind howled in from outside. The window was a dark cavern, where night outside was already painting the sky an inky black.

"Peter!" Harry yelled. He didn't think he'd get much time for explanations, so instead, for the second time that evening, he pointed his wand and said, " _Legilimens!"_

 _Harry, standing there, but then his eyes morphed colour and he was James and there were two others beside him: Sirius and Lupin, and then Peter was crying and he was scared because Lord Voldemort was too powerful, much too dangerously powerful –_

 _– Peter telling a man in a hood that everyone bowed to, "That's where the Potters live!"–_

 _– a street full of muggles and then Peter yelled and_ _ **blasted the ground–**_

A shout broke him from his reverie.

" _Stop_!" Hermione screamed, and Harry's world came back in focus in time to see Peter disappear out the window.

The window of the dormitory that was seven floors high.

They ran across the glass, craning their heads out of the window in time to see Peter cast a cushioning charm on the air below him and slow in his fall. Ron was yelling in his ear, and Hermione was beginning to sound hysterical. But another movement caught Harry's eye: a dark shape that lunged out from the shadows by the wall of the castle. _Sirius._

Peter transformed again, dropping the wand and the Map, disappearing into the grass. The black dog followed, streaking through across the grounds like a dark arrow.

"Is that the Grim?" Ron demanded.

"Forget the Grim," Hermione said, "do you see the Dementors?"

Harry hadn't seen them until then. Hadn't seen the dark wave growing on the horizon. The Dementors approached; a tidal wave that drained the light from the world as it loomed closer and closer. A boiling storm. He felt their chill all the way from the top of the tower, like winter crawling up his spine.

The dog faltered, and although he could no longer see the rat, Harry knew Peter was still running. Chase on! He wanted to yell. Chase on! He pointed his wand arm out the window and yelled " _Expecto patronum!"_

There was nothing but a small, nebulous, mist. It didn't even reach down to the ground floor.

The Dementors continued on.

Then the dog turned back, racing towards the castle, and the rat escaped once and for all.

* * *

a/n still have to wrap up book 3 before we move onto goblet of fire :)) because clearly harry has lots of the year to go that we're gonna fill with non-canon stuff

this fandom has so much hate for dumbledore it's– it's astonishing. it does upset me a little to see people _trashing_ a character an author worked so hard to create... defacing him to a point where he's this 2d antagonist people just take the piss out of. and i know it's difficult not to just follow with the popular opinion here on ffnet, but please, if you're reading this and you happen to be one of the bashers, bear in mind that all characters deserve respect...


	6. book 3 end book 4 start

A number of things happened. A tale unravelled (one about Fidelius charms and betrayals), a black dog disappeared off the school grounds, and Remus Lupin announced his resignation. The man wasn't leaving quite yet, but the infamous curse of one-year-DADA teachers would persist.

The skies were clear above Hogwarts. Exams were still months off, and, for once, there was no ticking time-bomb hanging over Harry's head. He could sit back, relax… and his thoughts would inevitably turn to his father. And Tom. Who was _older than his father._ Merlin!

Wasn't that an odd thought? But the image of a schoolboy persisted, and Harry couldn't envision Tom as an old man. The writing on his hands was as elegant as ever and the silence in his head as quiet. Tom was a Death Eater. He was like a too-dark shade. The shade of a library on an otherwise sunny day, where the light had bled out until the darkness overwhelmed, and the room had twisted into a cold, endless dungeon. That was Tom, Harry thought. Death Eater. Head Boy. He couldn't find what Tom had pursued after Hogwarts, but from what he'd heard, Tom had always been the top of the top.

Harry looked at his own scores. They were mediocre, at best. Would Tom be disappointed in him? Hermione was growing paler and paler behind her tottering pile of books, Ron was slacking off and attempting to play chess, and Harry felt a sudden, arresting guilt. Would his parents be disappointed, too? They _had_ been talented – animagi in their fourth, fifth year? If they were all alive and around, would they be disappointed?

The guilt was heavy, and Harry was not strong.

Hermione must've been shocked when she marched into the library one day and saw _Harry_ there, with a book pile bigger than her own. Ink had splattered a little over his pages, his hands, a splotch or two on his face, because Harry had never been a tidy writer. But if anything, he was persistent. He wanted to become an animagus. He wanted to hand his essays in to perfection. He wanted to go to Potions class and laugh when Snape could find no faults with his brewing. He wanted those people who were there-but-not to be proud of him.

Naturally, not all those dreams could come true. While his essays and homework were completed to perfection for the first few weeks, their quality tapered off after a time, and Harry was only a little better than when he first began. Then there was Snape. Snape could always find faults. Whether his potion was just a shade off, even though he'd been memorising and practising the days before, Snape would always notice.

Neither, it appeared, could Harry become an Animagus. Even if he found a spot outside the castle, under the shades of the trees, the wind sighing, reaching deep inside, his creature always slipped away. It was like trying to catch the breeze.

It was infinitely frustrating, but every time Harry looked into a mirror, he saw his mother in his eyes and his father in his features. Saw Tom on his hands. And so he went back to try, try, try again. He still hadn't mastered the patronus charm, but he went on to learn others. Hexes and curses, charms and jinxes. All the while he was still on the Quidditch team with his stunning Firebolt.

Time ticked on by. _Another_ hourglass was running. It happened in the corridors, in the middle of mealtimes, sometimes even in _class._ A girl would scream in delight, or smile brightly enough to light up the ceiling of the Great Hall. Then she would leap into the arms of her soulmate and they would hug each other tightly. Or the girl would look up, surprised, and smile slowly like the emerging dawn, while her other half took her hand in his and beamed back.

Harry did not see a single other pair of two boys or two girls. Maybe they were hidden away, tucked in secret, but Harry did not know of them.

Most soulmates were in the same houses, because their shared souls reflected in their qualities. But occasionally they were scattered across the years and houses. Hufflepuff started this odd club where all students would commute, mingle, and try to find their other. It was a good time to start, apparently. When they were still young enough not to have faced the hardships of exams and life. Where they could go through a full life together, but still have thirteen, fourteen years of difference. Harry had never seen any of the Slytherins at one of the parties. He, obviously, declined to go too, using his studies as an excuse. Ron bought into it easily and didn't attend either. Harry wondered if his friend was still feeling guilty about what he'd said about Lupin, and was doing Harry a favour.

Malfoy and Hermione were twin furies. They seemed to echo and magnify off one another to become a whirlwind of studying. Not that they sat beside each other – they worked in opposite ends of the library, but still in this strange synchrony. Next year there would be a new course: soul magic. Students would collaborate with their soulmates and produce spells of extravagant strengths, as well as strengthen their bond with each other.

That was one course Harry was definitely not taking.

But in anticipation of this new course, a strange man turned up one morning during breakfast. He was an old, old, man, his eyes gleaming like gems and his hair white and frail. His robes were simple and frayed, but laced with runes that shimmered and whispered of power, and he walked with a staff that clacked and clattered against the ground. Harry remembered seeing him the years before, but he had never bothered asking why the old man came. There were many things Harry hadn't asked about. Like the skeletal horses that pulled the carriages every year.

The man was almost unnoticeable to those he wasn't concerned with. Magically so. He provided a service, as it turned out. He would measure the strength of someone's bond with their soulmate, even if the two hadn't met yet. It'd help the third-years decide if their bond with their soulmate was strong enough to bother applying for the soul magic course.

Harry didn't bother until Hermione grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him down the corridor, hissing that this was a perfect opportunity! The old man knew all about soulmates, anyway. He'd be able to tell Harry the specifics about his broken bond. Harry just swallowed and let his friend tow him through the corridors, to the classroom the old man set up every year. There was a long queue outside, the place filled with chatter, but third-years got priority. They would go in, one by one, and leave with expressions of elation, or disappointment, or dismissive shrugs.

It was Harry's turn.

The classroom had not been changed much from its original state. The old man – no one knew his name, they just called him Old Man – had simply taken three chairs and faced them towards each other at the front of the room. The man was sitting on one of them. His gnarled wooden staff was leaning against a desk, and the light from outside cast the room into a comforting yellow glow. There must have been Silencing charms up, too, because Harry could not hear any of the students outside.

"Sit," the man said. Harry did, and the old man held out his hands. There were words on the old man's hands as well. Harry tried not to read them. "Put your hands in mine." His voice was like the flowing of a stream. Quiet and calm, going somewhere, but in its own time.

Harry did, and he waited. The old man closed his eyes – what colour had they been, again? – and simply sat there. Somehow, Harry didn't mind the wait. The old man's hands were leathery under his own. It was like touching the aged face of a book. When they finally withdrew, Harry caught a glimpse of gold between those leathery fingers.

There were seven golden threads laying on the man's palms, connected to Harry's own. They all looked like woven silk. Frail and dim. The man gave a quiet exhale. "There is a snapped one here," he said. Harry looked at his downwards-facing palms. Was that just him, or were they glowing? No matter, he could see another thread dangling from his palm, where it hadn't reached the man's hands. It was the starting nub of a eighth that was gone. It had been the diary. That meant– Tom must've split his soul _this_ many times?!

"These connections are all very weak," the old man said. Hearing it confirmed was like a kick to the gut. Harry just stared at those golden lines, eyes wide. "Two of them are growing. Very slowly. One of them is only sustained by _you._ " His free hand pointed at two of the lines, although Harry couldn't tell how they were unique. They looked just as spider-spun as the rest. "The rest are dormant. In other words, dead."

That was more than a kick to the gut. That was a knife in the chest.

The old man continued in his frank tone. "Turn your hands over."

When had Harry's hands started shaking? He turned his palms upwards and let out a gasp when he saw the brilliance of the threads. Right by his skin, they glowed so vividly they illuminated his whole palm. They were bulbs, beacons, promises of light, that shimmered out the further they got from Harry's hands. "Unhindered, your bond is this strong," the man said. He paused. "He must not want you."

Harry reeled back. The old man looked up, the golden lines disappearing, and how had Harry not realised before that those eyes were the colour of ocean and the sky, the colour of endlessness, secrets treasured? "How can you know that?" Know that Harry's soulmate was male. Know that Tom didn't want Harry.

The old man reached out and wrapped a hand around his staff. "There is only one way of stifling a bond. Let me teach it to you."

"You don't normally teach students how to." It was more a question than anything.

"There is only one soul in this world that has been split seven times," the old man replied. "You should know how to cut yourself from him." The staff twirled and a piece of parchment was conjured, ink tracing over it in a blur. "It is simple. But only I, and I alone, know the process in its entirety." Harry knew, in a flash, that the old man had done it before. "You will kill someone." Harry's heart froze. He had to do _what_? "Killing will destabilise your soul. Perform the ritual I am inscribing for you right now and it will transfer a portion of your soul to a container of your choice–" How exactly was this supposed to be _stifling_ the bond? It sounded more like– "After which, you kill yourself."

"What," Harry managed.

"The soul in the container will prevent your soul from departing completely. In the moment when you are neither dead nor alive, but merely a soul _,_ you will see the strings that bind you. You may influence them then."

"Do I have to die? Can I reverse it?"

The old man lowered his head. "You do not have to _remain_ dead. All that is required is the blood of your soulmate for you to remanifest as whole as you are now. As for the reversal: you must feel desperation and worry for your soulmate, you _want_ them again, and if you do," the man paused. "They will come back to you."

Harry stared and stared and stared. The parchment finished and rolled up on its own, and it drifted over, gently, to Harry. "You can see souls," he said, slowly. Did that mean…

"I died a very long time ago," the old man told him, "and remained dead for centuries more before my soulmate discovered what he had to do." He set his staff back down with a _clunk_. "A part of me remains in Limbo, still."

In the warm room, the words were chilling. How old was the wizard? "He?"

"Magic pairs the strongest with the strongest." For the first time, Harry thought the old wizard actually looked slightly amused, although slightly snidely so. "The weaker do not have the liberty of overcoming biological barriers. But forget all that, Harry Potter. I have given all that I can give to you."

The day was absolutely intent on flabbergasting Harry, wasn't it? "I–Well, thank you…" He wanted to address the old man by his _real_ name. 'Old Man' just wasn't respectful enough. He wanted to… well, how was he supposed to feel, knowing that he was given the choice to stop being soulmates with Tom? How many other wizards wished they didn't have to have their soulmates, but were stuck with them forever? He'd read hundreds of accounts where people's soulmates had been murderers or criminals, and mostly they'd ended in happily ever after and sometimes they both turned to crooks and sometimes one of them just couldn't handle it so they both blew the candle out, but all of the times they'd wished, at some point, that they didn't have to be soulmtes.

But here Harry was. Given a choice. But what sort of choice was this? He'd have to _kill_ somebody. And he'd never give up Tom. It was unthinkable to abandon Tom to his loneliness, his misery...

"I am not legend. Not fate," the wizard said, still sitting in his chair. If it weren't for those too-deep eyes, he could almost be any old man alone on a balcony, rocking in a wooden seat, listening to the world turn and watching the sun set. "Merely an old man dead too many times." He smiled. "Good luck, young Harry Potter."

Harry thanked him again and pocketed the roll of parchment and as he left the room, he promised to himself that he'd never tear his soul in two.

–––

The moon rose and set, waxed and waned; sometimes Harry thought about Lupin and Sirius when he looked up.

The exams came and went. Potions was nerve-wracking, and Harry thought he added just a hair too much ginger to get an O. Some of the others, like History of Magic and Divination, he didn't care about. And others actually went decently. He emerged from DADA smiling, Transfiguration with an unsteady grin. Even in Divination, Professor Trelawney didn't force him to do anything strange. Harry just sat in the misty room and babbled whatever came to mind.

Then they were lazy days that came in the afterglow of exams. Days that were spent in the library, where Hermione worked beside him and Ron was practising Quidditch outside. For some reason, his freckled friend didn't even argue. They'd see each other over summer, Ron said instead, it'd be enough time. They'd watch the World Cup! Harry agreed, then he and Hermione hopped into a classroom where she conjured chairs and furniture for him to shatter with all sorts of jinxes and hexes, trying to learn to unravel his spells as they flew, just in case they headed to the wrong target. Or he'd study, enraptured, while Hermione and Draco wordlessly melted chairs and tables into liquid wood and, with a wave of their wands, reshaped them into statues of leaping horses.

One day he caught up to Dumbledore after breakfast, and asked for a word. More than a word, actually. A Fidelius charm.

"More people than you and I know the identity of your soulmate," Dumbledore said calmly.

" _What_? How?" Harry stared at the old man, his wrinkled skin, and that long scar across his face that for some reason drew Harry's eye every time.

"I am the Secret Keeper of their lives, too, Harry." He inclined his head. "I'm afraid I cannot divulge those details to you yet."

Harry let him go. For now. "Can you– can you cast it anyway, for me? And keep you and I as the Secret Keepers?"

"I can." And Harry felt a hundred times safer.

Time slid by until the Hogwarts train was disappearing on the horizon. It was the quietest time of Harry's life; like the stillness of a lake, walking through the winter, tree branches bare, birds trailing after dark sunshine.

Funny thing, Harry thought, looking over his letters. Sirius and Lupin had hidden away somewhere private (they were his godfathers, wasn't that an odd thought?).

(He mentioned, once, _I heard from somewhere that men aren't normally matched with men or women with women because they can't have children unless they're really magically strong._ Harry had strayed away from the implications of that. He wasn't strong! Was Tom supposed to pick up all his slack?

 _Harry, the Fates must've known I wouldn't have children anyway._ And Harry felt gut-wrenchingly awful for ever asking in the first place. One day, if he lived to be old, he'd campaign for werewolf rights. It'd happen.)

The Malfoys had also invited him and Hermione to their Manor. They were finally recognising her publicly. They were paying for her ticket into the Box during the cup, they were redistributing their investments, but they were– well, (Hermione wrote,) they were still businessmen and social engineers at heart. They hadn't deferred to the Light side, no, but they quietly slipped away into the greyer zones. The Dark, Lord Voldemort, had hated soulmates. Said that if you were strong, you could defy and reject them. And the Malfoys didn't believe that. They just didn't have need to defy that until now.

The Manor was, Harry realised, was not a lavish home to show off and wow every guest. Okay, Draco Malfoy might have represented it like that, and maybe Lucius, too, but Harry noticed what it really was. It was a _homage._ A relic. A standing representation all in the honour of the Malfoy family. It was like a statue; people could admire it, yes, but its true intention lay behind respecting the face, the animal, the man that had been sculpted.

Lucius apologised to him, which was probably the motivation behind inviting Harry. He was seated in a comfortable chair in the main study, and Lucius said that he had just wanted to get rid of the diary and let it play a nasty little trick. Truly. Had never known what it would do, hadn't intended to nearly put the school out of commission. Harry hadn't felt any lies, so he'd smiled and said, "It's fine, Mr Malfoy. If you look after my best friend well, I'll forgive you for nearly anything."

Well, _his_ motivation for the visit was that he got to see Hermione and get away from the Dursleys. (Petunia's expression when she saw Mr Malfoy had been rather amusing, too. She'd looked positively offended at his odd-coloured hair, but then conflicted when she realised he had far too much money.) It all worked out. He'd be going to the Burrow, after. The Weasleys would take him to the World Cup and Hermione would go with the Malfoys.

"I'm grateful," Harry said, "that you took her in. Really."

Mr Malfoy waved him away. "If I did not, my son would've eloped." Implying it wasn't out of heart, but the face of the Malfoy family.

Funny.

But it wasn't Mr Malfoy's reputation that was the problem. "Couldn't you have another son as the face of your family?" Harry said, attempting to look innocent. Look at how accepting Mr Malfoy was now, of Hermione. All for Draco, Draco, Draco. Draco who thought he wasn't good enough for his father.

"How I treat my family is none of your concern," the aristocrat said stiffly.

Mr Malfoy focused his eyes and his hands on his desk instead, needlessly shuffling a few papers. The Malfoys had some serious family issues, father caring for son, son feeling hated instead of cared... but they weren't Harry's to solve.

He bid the man a thank you and goodbye, then went in search of a room to stay in. They said he could pick whatever room, since the important big ones were occupied already.

Illuminated corridors and thick carpeted hallways Harry went through, up and down, into and around, until the rooms were filled with silence. Until he could feel the years in the dusted halls. The room he chose was small and humble, with glowing curtains that filtered all the light into yellow like a lampshade, and walls dark brown wood. It was an unused study. Bookshelves lined one of the walls, but they whispered of disuse, and a small bed was shoved into the corner like an afterthought. A desk at the window stood empty.

Harry liked it. He never thought he'd like the heart of Malfoy ego, but hey. One of the Malfoy ancestors' tastes really aligned with his. With a glance down at his hands, he thought Tom would've liked a room like this, too.

Tom seemed to be excited these days. The words had ceased to be curses and were mostly things like, " _Yes_."

" _It will work_."

" _I will be free."_

Hermione roped him into playing lots of games of chess, which he was rubbish at, and proceeded to gush about how she'd introduce her family to the Malfoys and how the Manor was fantastic.

There was a constant push and pull between Hermione and Narcissa. Narcissa was the more open of the two, between Lucius and her. (Only in the matters of caring for family, though. Harry had no doubt that she was a deadly veiled opponent in the political landscape.) But that meant she was at once appreciative and disapproving of Hermione.

"Dear, you absolutely must wear a dress to the World Cup," she said over dinner, and Harry had literally not once ever seen Hermione in a dress. "It will be your debut as a Malfoy."

No, Hermione replied, she was not going to be tempted into dressing up for the cameras. To do that once was a trap that would lead to her doing it again and again and again and again… She would be _Hermione_ instead, the Mudblood girl everybody knew as a workaholic, and she would be shown to have _been_ accepted and to _have_ accepted the Malfoy family just as that: the Mudblood girl.

Harry thought Narcissa had been stunned into silence by the fact Hermione had actually called herself a Mudblood. The younger Malfoy was also giving her a frown but was also probably holding her hand under the table.

But, Narcissa began, and Harry inhaled his dinner before politely excusing himself. He went for a bit of a walk around the grounds and met a certain house elf who wouldn't stop singing praises after him. Then he got chased back into the Manor by a few strangely aggressive albino peacocks.

Draco Malfoy found him the next morning, after breakfast. Narcissa had dragged Hermione off to Diagon Alley for a 'shopping session' that Harry was really quite dubious about. "Your soulmate," the other boy said, "do you know her name? Father's off at the Ministry. We can look through his records."

"You know where he keeps them?"

"Of course. It's important to keep track of who's on what side, you know. Now, was she a Death Eater or just a minion?" Malfoy was all business. He'd go fetch them and bring them down to look through.

Tom was powerful, no doubt. Not to mention the Diary had been handled by Voldemort himself. "Probably a Death Eater," Harry admitted. "She–" he was so grateful for the fact that Malfoy couldn't innately pick up lies like he could. "–was born a long time before me."

"Of course she was. How else would she follow the Dark Lord?"

"No," Harry struggled for his words. Should he tell Malfoy this? It was the best chance he'd get to find out exactly where Tom had been in Voldemort's. And under the Fidelius Charm, Malfoy wouldn't be able to tell anyone else. "Like, a long, _long_ time."

Malfoy stared at him. "So, what, five years?"

"More like fifty," Harry said light-heartedly.

There was a dangerously long pause.

"Oh very funny, Potter." But he did not sound very amused. "Unfortunately, we don't have records dating back that far. What a pity."

Backtrack, backtrack, backtrack. "Then I won't need to look through them," he laughed.

"Oh, for– Potter, you can't be _serious._ "

"I'm not," Harry lied, "look, Malfoy, it's fine. I know her name and everything. I don't need to know her position by Voldemort."

As expected, the other wizard flinched at the sound of the name. "That's... accepting."

"I've had a year or two to think on it," and how could he have come to any conclusion except to keep loving Tom? Tom, who'd lived as half a soul for so many years, and ended up splitting it so he wouldn't feel anymore? Tom, who'd been alone for so long he'd grown spite for Harry, Tom, who thought he didn't need a soulmate?

"I hope you don't think you'll be able to turn your soulmate to the Light," Malfoy said, and Harry tried not to look guilty. As it turned out, Harry was a terrible actor. "Thank Merlin Hermione is a cleverer person than you."

"Hey!"

"How much would you consider deferring to the Dark?"

"What?" Harry said, "No way! Excuse me, my parents were _killed_ by the Dark!"

"Exactly," Malfoy replied, "what if _her_ family died because of the Light? Honestly, Potter, get your head out of your arse sometimes." The boy threw Harry a bit of a snooty look, and then twirled away.

Harry went back to the room he'd chosen and sat there for a long while, watching and considering the fading sunshine.

–––

Not long after, he was shipped over to the Weasleys. Hermione visited for a few days, too, but she still stayed in the Malfoy Manor. Some of the younger Weasleys gave the offending Pureblood family a few dirty looks when they heard the news that _wonderful_ Hermione was stuck with _snivelling_ Draco, but their mother slapped them upside the heads and gave them stern looks, and their little romantic hearts were eventually won over by the way Hermione glowed and Draco trailed after her as though she'd hung the moon.

Harry hid a smile and thought about Tom. Maybe one day him, too, eh?

He liked the Burrow a bit more than the Manor. While the solace in the Manor was refreshing, he had to say he loved the boisterousness of the Weasley household. The magic that was used in every small thing – he'd refused to appear awed in the Manor, because that'd remind them that he was Muggle raised – and the sibling interaction was just what won him over. He couldn't imagine that, having these people woven into his life like that, for them to toss jokes around and live so easily together. They were like cogs in a machine, wind currents, that somehow _knew_ how to flow together. Harry didn't even feel like an outsider. He was enveloped in their radiance and loved it there.

When the World Cup rolled around, he felt like this would've been what it'd feel like everyday if his parents were still alive. Maybe he'd even have a younger brother or sister at this point. He felt a stab of anger – at Voldemort, of course – for denying him a lifetime. How many other families had also been snuffed out, ended like a spluttering flame, because Voldemort had crushed them? How many people had lost their worlds because of this– this– _Voldemort?_

To him, Voldemort was a caricature of pain, of death. Voldemort was the one who'd stolen Quirrell's life, this ominous looming figure that shrouded the world, more idea than man, who hated Muggles and hated soulmates and just seemed to dictate everyone to hate everything.

Harry snapped out of his bitter thoughts, instead watching hundreds of eyes follow Hermione's every action, but mostly the fact that she was _holding Draco Malfoy's hand in front of the entire world._ Nonetheless, no one dared to stand up and yell. In fact, more people looked like they wanted to clap, but Harry caught some cold glares Mr Malfoy flashed here and there to keep a few people in check.

The game was over in whoops and cheers, the Quidditch players looping around the field. Harry thought maybe this could one day be his future.

It was was an unpleasant wake-up call when a skull appeared, in the night, over the stadium.

"Get out, get out, get out!"

There were screams in the din and nothing but a mad scramble. "What are we running from?" Harry demanded. Ron was crashing through the campsite beside him, eyes blown wide with fear.

"The Dark Mark." Torches and firelight, and there were Muggles being hung upside-down. Laughed at. Tortured. Harry hesitated at the treeline. He'd fought Quirrell before, hadn't he? _Someone_ had to put a stop to this–

"Harry!" Ron hissed under his breath, "don't tell me you're thinking of doing something stupid _again_!"

"There are–"

" _Aurors_ coming!" Ron said, then dragged Harry further into the trees.

There _were_ Aurors, in fact. Harry learnt this after he was ordered to kneel with his hands behind his head and was accused by one Bartemius Crouch. And then a house elf appeared _holding his wand._ Hadn't that elf been sitting next to him in the Box?

The Daily Prophet the next day was truly something formidable. Between the roaring news of the Malfoy heir's new 'Mudblood' and the attack on the World Cup, the Wizarding World had plenty to chew on.

When Summer cooled down and Harry finally re-entered the Hogwarts halls it was awash with whispers. The ceiling overhead was deep and dark and cloudy, and Tom was murmuring on his hands " _Yessssss._ "

The doors of the Great Hall flew open as Dumbledore was speaking and lightning ate the world from inside out. For a moment Harry swore his body filled with an elation that wasn't his – it lifted him up, swathed him in a churning roiling tainted _joy_ – and he threw himself at it, equally as joyed, a dying man scrabbling for water, _tomtomtomtomtomtom–_

But his head fell silent once more.

And when he looked up, he swore that electric eye of the Mad Moody was staring straight at him.

–––

"The Killing Curse," Moody growled, and the class stared on in silence. "There's only one way to stop it, and the proof of it's sitting right here in front of me. _Love!"_ he barked. They all jumped in their seats. "If your soulmate cares for you enough, they might just take the hit for you! They might die, they might live. But none of you have soulmates who are _strong_ and _loving_ enough, so don't rely on it!"

" _Constant vigilance!"_

–––

It really shouldn't have been surprising when Harry's name flew out of the goblet. But _his_ jaw dropped and he felt like someone had ripped him away from his seat.

He stared over at his friends, and when he met Ron's eyes–

The world lurched because Harry'd stumbled out of his chair. He couldn't face that look. He never thought he'd see Ron look at _him_ with such disgust and loathing. Hermione, too– Gods! She looked horrified. Not _for_ him, but _at_ him.

Even the teachers were staring. He met his Head of House's eyes, and they were filled with disapproval.

How could he handle this?

The hundreds of gazes dragged his feet to a stop.

He thought he could just have a normal life. Wasn't Voldemort already dead? Hadn't the Dark already taken enough from him? His parents, his soulmate, now– his friends? His classmates? Couldn't he just have a life like the Weasleys, where he had brothers and sisters to come back to, people who would always accept him?

"I don't want to participate," he blurted. His voice gave an embarrassing warble, and whispers broke out behind him. He was fixed to the spot. Please let him go, please, tell him that he didn't have to–

"Unfortunately, Mr Potter," Snape said from behind the stage, his dark eyes glinting, "the Goblet creates a binding contract. As you might have known if you had been listening instead of _plotting_ how to thwart the age limits."

Harry jerked as if slapped, his face heating. "I did _not–_ "

" _That's enough,"_ Snape said. "Come," and then Harry's feet began to move again, slowly, with the growing sense that he never wanted to look back.

–––

"He is too young!" Fleur said, in her lilting accent, raising imperious eyebrows.

"Dumbledore!" Karkaroff demanded, "Do you have an explanation for this blatant attempt at _cheating?_ "

The voices swirled in Harry's head. Accusations. Defenses. And he'd just stood there with his head bowed dreading the moment he'd have to return to the Gryffindor tower. He didn't want to compete. Wasn't Voldemort dead? Wasn't the Dark already at bay? Why was he dragged into chaos, once and once again? He just wanted to sit back and learn, make his there-but-not parents proud, make Tom proud, find a way to be strong–

Not be the laughing stock of the Daily Prophet and his peers. For fuck's sake.

The Gryffindor portrait swung open to noise. "Harry!" someone called over the din, "Tell us how you did it, mate!" A party was in full swing, bright colours hanging all over the couches, Gryffindors laughing and making a general ruckus, and a banner over the wall that looked suspiciously like it read, 'Slytherin, eat shit!'

Couldn't they see the misery on his face? "I didn't–"

"Nonsense," Fred said, stomping over to Harry, slinging an arm over his shoulder and winking. "But we get it, Harry, a magician never shares his secrets."

Someone pushed a Butterbeer into his hands. "Look–" Harry tried again.

People jostled them around and Harry could feel it all rising inside him to a boiling point. None of this– _none_ of this he deserved. "Don't worry!" Fred continued obliviously, "we're not going to force you to spill the beans. Would've been nice to know, though."

"Yeah," suddenly Ron was there, sneering, "would've been nice for you to tell us and put our names in too. Or, you know, you could hog all the fame to yourself. Don't you get enough of it already?"

Harry just _burst_.

"I _didn't put my name in!_ " The room paused to stare, and Harry was just– it was clawing under his skin, lashing out in his words. "What about that don't you get?! Why do you just _immediately_ assume–"

"Well," Ron cut in coldly, the cruel look on his face unfamiliar, "you've always been breaking the rules, haven't you? About time you decided you weren't going to break them with your _useless_ friend anymore."

"I didn't put my name in," Harry gritted, fists clenched. Later, he would regret having an argument in full view of his entire house, but for now he was too enraged, too blinded by the red mist to think clearly.

"Real easy to believe that, isn't it?" Ron said, "Do you have _any idea,_ any idea at all, how hard it is to live _under_ you _?_ You've got no bloody clue! Just _look_ at you."

"Do you mean you think I want this?" Harry said, and there might've been a fine tremor running all throughout his body, where anger was threatening to burst at the seams, " _You_ want this? You want to be _shit_ on by the newspapers, you want no one to believe you – you want a life where you have no family?" People were murmuring uncomfortably among each other now, and Harry didn't care at all what they were thinking.

"You really don't see what you get. Winning the cup each year? Seeker? Defeating the _Darkest wizard of all time?_ Name _one_ thing, Harry that you aren't better than me at."

"I–" Words weren't enough. "How petty _are you?!"_ he exploded, "who _cares_ if I get better scores in class–"

"I guess the Boy-Who-Lived just has never had to care about being at the _bottom,_ " Ron sneered. "Look, I'll tell you one thing I'm better at: at least _I_ have a _soulmate,_ " Harry could see the ink moving on Ron's hand, suddenly distinctly aware of his own broken, shattered bond. Ron's words stung like a betrayal. "Doesn't that make you feel the way I _always_ feel?"

"You know what," he said, voice suddenly dry, the room suddenly too small, "if you hate me because you're so _jealous_ that you're not 'special', that sounds like more of your problem than mine." He backed away, out the portrait hole. He just needed to get out of there. "Also? Fuck _you_ , Ron. Fuck you for stooping so low–" he raised both his hands, where the whole room could see his empty palms, "–it doesn't hurt because I'm jealous – no, I'm happy for Hermione, for anyone who's got their soulmate – it hurts because I know s– _she's_ in pain and I'm not there to save her."

As he turned away, stumbling out into the corridor, he only caught the tail end of Ron's comment of Harry's "hero complex" before he was fleeing and gone.


	7. book 4 cont

a/n double posted today. make sure you didn't skip the last chapter. i was just really excited to write this one.

* * *

If anything, Harry devolved into a hermit. If the Tournament was the thing that ruined his friendship with Ron and his place in his House, he was going to stomp it into the ground with his sheer fury.

The Wand Weighing ceremony and _everything –_ Rita bloody Skeeter – only served to make him more furious and determined. He stopped going to meals, opting instead to sneak into the kitchens (which Malfoy helped him find, thanks), where the house elves were pleased enough to see him, and where Hermione would often turn up to talk. She was probably the only one who'd stuck to his side, aside from the occasional extra person he'd met like that Luna Lovegood. He also kept sending letters back and forth to Lupin, and consequently, Sirius.

He was in one of the classrooms, summoning chairs and tables to him and dodging as they whizzed past, when the door opened. In a whirl of movement, he spun around and sent a Stinging hex at the intruder, hand outstretched to unravel the hex if it was somebody he shouldn't be firing at– but it was Hermione, and she and Malfoy were practising their Shields–

His bright spell shattered against a golden wall that suddenly stretched around Hermione. Harry stared. Her wand wasn't even drawn, and she hadn't uttered a word. "What–"

"We were trying to see if we could cast things over the bond," Hermione explained, a smile growing. "And I think it worked fairly well. Don't you?" She spent a lot of her time practising with Malfoy, now, because their two houses were both hovering in ambivalence, where students didn't know if they felt like they wanted to support her or laugh at her. Or be suspicious of her, because she must've had some trait that the 'Slytherin snake' connected with.

"That– That's actually really impressive," he replied.

"Most pairs can't manage it," she said, "actually– it's banned from the Tournament, so you're not put back. And it's more difficult over distance, too – so even if they tried, they probably couldn't."

Harry was pacing the room and still muttering spells under his breath, watching his bag rotate and spin before zipping around the room.

"You're stressed," Hermione said.

"Because I might mess up my spells when I actually need them, and I don't know what's going to be in the First Task," Harry replied, letting the bag fall. "It could be anything. Enchanted furniture, duels, whatever. So far I think the Summoning and Shielding charms are the most useful, because I can like, summon my opponent's shoes or something. Or Summon something from inside the castle. You said that was allowed in the Tournament, right?"

Hermione nodded. "Contestants used to purposefully cast enchantments on some of the windows so they wouldn't break, but I don't think anyone's thought of doing that this time. But honestly, Harry, you'll be fine – and – well, do think of making things up with Ron, won't you?"

Harry's lips thinned at the mention of his former friend. "He'll need to realise that my life isn't fun on his own."

"Harry–"

"I nearly died in my second and first year." Harry said. His hand drifted down to a huge circular scar right beneath his ribs. "I broke so many bones last year and kept fainting whenever Dementors came near. If Ron can't tell that my life is more dangerous than glorious through all of that, then I don't think my words are going to work any better. Besides–" he winced, because his way with words was pretty shit. "I– my temper. Isn't the best," he said lamely.

Hermione frowned, but she seemed resigned. "If you think it'll work," she said, "you boys can't stay angry at each other forever, anyway. There's a reason why you became friends in the first place." And then she closed the door and left Harry to his Shielding and Summoning.

–––

Uncannily enough, Hermione's words were true. Occasionally, even though they had both moved seats to opposite ends of the room in all their shared classes, they'd snort in tandem and then look away in embarrassment as if they hadn't agreed with each other.

But more importantly, the date of the First Task was drawing closer and closer and Harry still felt woefully unprepared, stumbling in most of his classes and cancelling Legilimency lessons with Draco and sneaking around the castle under the Cloak until Moody caught him and led him to _dragons._

He'd told Cedric and panicked until here he was now, standing in a open with the crowd in his ears.

A Summoning charm later, Harry was weaving through the jaws of a Hungarian Horntail and trying to cast a Shield to keep the flames at bay– and it was too many things at once, trying to get his wand to obey, to clutch onto the Firebolt to weave and duck and dodge, to keep his eyes on that great horned head that spewed flames–

And the tail came out of nowhere to sunk into him and open his side red.

 _The egg, the egg, the bloody_ _**egg**_ _!_

Later, Harry would have no idea how he got out alive, but ragged and bleeding dry, he'd done it.

Maybe the Triwizard Tournament wouldn't kill him after all.

–––

Harry had lied. The Triwizard Tournament _would_ kill him – him, stepping all over the toes of Parvati as he tried to dance. Politely, she found another partner after their compulsory turn was over and so he spent the entire night moping over Tom.

For the Second Task, they took Hermione, and Malfoy helpfully nicked Gillyweed from Snape's stores. Harry highly suspected that the Slytherin had been caught in the act, because Malfoy was untalented in the art of stealing, but if he had been, he didn't say. At least Snape wouldn't be angry.

Ron kept trying to approach Harry, too, with apologies. And Harry told him, "Prove to me that you've got something you're proud of before we start breaking rules together again," so you won't get jealous, went unsaid.

Harry may or may not have also had an incident one night by the Forbidden forest, involving a stunned Bulgarian Seeker, a disappearing Crouch, and far too many yet unknown secrets.

–––

"Come on." Malfoy jutted his chin upwards. "You have to _want_ to do it."

The two of them stood in the classroom, facing off. "I don't want to see you and Hermione snogging," Harry protested, and Malfoy's composure slipped for a moment when he snorted a laugh.

"Your enemies will have done worse than snog," Malfoy said. "You have to _want_ to see that, in detail," he added with a leer.

"Merlin," Harry muttered under his breath, but he raised his wand again and steeled himself. " _Legilimens!"_

The outside world was swallowed away as Harry's consciousness rushed forwards towards the other boy, pausing right before his Occlumency shield, smoothing over to prod at the barrier. It stood unwavering and solid. He doubted Malfoy would have any weak points, but it was still best to give it a try before brute forcing his way–

A hand yanked him out of his concentration, throwing him back with a gasp. He caught sight of Malfoy's shocked face and then–

" _Potter,"_ Snape said, his face curled in an ugly sneer, "do you think yourself so above the rules that you can _break into other's minds?_ I don't think you know what it feels like yet." Then he shoved Harry back, and said, coldly, succinctly, even though he probably didn't require it, " _Legilimens."_

If he thought he had any substantial Occlumency shields before, they were stripped away like flayed skin. Snape tore apart his mind as easily as snapping flimsy sticks. Harry's memories flashed before his eyes – Mr Crouch raving and ranting; Winky hiccuping about her master; Hermione's face surrounded by ghost-like swirls of hair; Hagrid showing him the dragons in the dead of the night; Neville standing there, shaking; Mad-Eye Moody casting the Avada Kedavra in a blinding flash of green; Ron yelling at him with his face contorted in anger; Pettigrew leaping out the tower's window; Tom sitting there quietly, saying "I didn't know you were my soulmate"–

He was on his hands and knees, shaking, staring at the floor and unsure when he had gotten there. His mind felt tender, like an open wound, and he wasn't sure he could stand at all.

"Stop!" he dimly heard Malfoy saying, "Professor– no, it was my idea– I was supposed to be teaching him–"

" _Fool boy!"_ Snape snarled, and Harry felt a distant ringing shock because he'd never heard Snape so angry at Malfoy. "Were you so confident with your shields that you thought he'd never break through them and break _you? Legilimens!"_

There was a _thud_ from the other side of the room, and when Harry finally found the strength to look up, Snape had already released Malfoy and was standing there, face looking whiter than usual. "Did you think your flimsy locked door would keep Karkaroff or, heaven forbid, _Rita_ out?"

Harry was still too befuddled to make words, and thought vaguely that if Rita Skeeter _had_ barged in on them performing illegal magic, Malfoy would've gone on serious damage control and Obliviated her or something. Merlin, next time they should get Hermione to sit in on watch.

Snape didn't seemed impressed at his lack of coherence, and strode over to Harry to cast something across his head that felt like cold ice. It seemed to trickle into his bones and coalesce there like steel rods. "Stay out of _sight_ next time."

He slammed the door shut as he left and locked it with such complex enchantments that both Harry and Draco missed dinner and sat there in distress until Hermione came to break them out.

"That makes no sense," Hermione said, later, "was Snape just looking for something to say? Rita's long been banned from the school grounds."

–––

There had to be some sort of reason why he was where he was now. Panting, blood dried on his face, robes singed, but most of all – standing there before the Cup with no one else in sight. It, he thought, had been a little _too_ easy. Maybe a Blast-Ended Skrewt of two, but nothing a few well-placed, well-practised jinxes and hexes couldn't handle.

Wasn't the Tournament aimed towards students older than him? Hadn't some of them _died?_ Surely, if it were this easy– perhaps not _easy –_ but, if it hadn't challenged _him_ that much, then none of those best students from the three schools could've failed.

It was with this nagging suspicion that he grabbed the handle of the Cup–

–and was jerked off his feet, his insides wrung in painful knots and his head a dizzying blur.

The ground came as a shock and his feet flew out from under him, eyes suddenly filled with darkness and his mouth filled with dust. He was on the ground, the air turned from fresh breeze to musty mold, disuse. Why–? Was this a part of the tournament? Sharp stones dug into his hands as he drew himself up, and he squinted in the dark.

A rectangular stone came into view, then another, rounded at the top, and another rectangle, and they stretched in rows and row–

It came to him suddenly. This sad abandoned place, a graveyard. There was no way this could be a part of the Tournament, then. They wouldn't disrespect the dead like this.

The hit came from nowhere, and suddenly Harry was sprawling across the biting floor again, his glasses cracking with a snap, a thick hand wrenching his wand away and grabbing him by his short hair. It bent his head back until he looked up into the face of Peter Pettigrew.

"Look who we have here," Pettigrew smiled. Immediately Harry thrashed in response, kicking and struggling with his mind only on _escape._ He couldn't be here. Something had gone wrong. How had they managed to change the _Cup_ to a portkey? Now Pettigrew had him in an iron grip and could do anything because Harry was so helpless, so useless without his wand. Hadn't he managed accidental magic so many times? Hadn't he shattered cups and even _teleported?_ Why wouldn't he do any of it now? Why? Why was Pettigrew free to drag him across the dirt and stones?

"Peter," Harry gritted, "you're making a mistake."

Pettigrew said nothing, just pinned him down and tied his hands, his feet, and hauled him to a gravestone where a cauldron was bubbling underneath. Harry's scar flared to life, and with his hands crushed behind him, between his back and the stone, he could feel his the back of his hands start to burn. The feeling he'd only felt once before: when he'd gone to stop Quirrell. If he focused on it, he could almost forget the pulsing in his head, the trembling chant that Pettigrew had started up.

Oh, Merlin, was Harry going to be sacrificed? Was he going to die?

" _Darling,"_ he felt the word etch out, slowly, as if there were a quill drawn across his skin that left sparks in its wake.

"Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son." The cauldron hissed in an echoed whisper of its servant's words.

" _Tonight we end this,"_

"Flesh of the servant, willingly given, you will revive your master."

Pettigrew screamed. And Harry kept his eyes open at the burst of blood, bleached bone.

" _my Occlumency and I."_ His head hurt so much, and he clung onto consciousness by that tracing flame.

Pettigrew approached him, hands shaking, and put the knife to Harry's throat. "Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken," he said, sounding an instant away from breaking, and drew the thinnest line for Harry's blood to bead, "you will resurrect your foe." It collected in a small, glass jar that seemed to catch the light like a candle in Harry's fogged mind.

" _Say goodbye."_ Tom wrote.

Tom didn't want him, and Harry was suddenly sure that he was going to die. All alone, his friends far away and his family dead, his one love filled with loathing. Harry was going to die here, when Tom was celebrating his freedom, when Harry would never know if his feelings had ever filtered through, his pain, his sadness– when Harry would never know if his feelings had filtered through and Tom had felt them and hadn't cared at all.

Could he feel it now? This thunderstorm raging a colossal white, this blinding pain, this misery swirling like a hurricane.

There was smoke rising from the caudron, Pettigrew was whimpering, and the pain in his head was a blinding whiteness that grew and grew and shrunk his world smaller and smaller until all he could hear was the roar of pain and the crashing of his thoughts.

He'd never realised what Tom's connection, although broken, had felt like. It'd just always been _there_ , and you couldn't miss something until–

–it was gone.

A monitor cut off. Those thin golden lines snapped. His body torn apart with only a whirlpool left behind, drawing the scraps of him closer and closer, closer to the precipice before it struck and hauled him down into insanity.

Tom was gone.

He'd never felt so empty.

Tom, Tom–

please, I need you, where are you? Tom– please don't hate me.

Was he crying? He wasn't, he wasn't. He couldn't feel anything but _the emptiness_ _._ Tom was gone and his absence drowned out everything else. _(_ Was it what it felt like in all those years Tom had been waiting?)

Didn't know you hated me this much–

Need you, need you, please come back–

He wasn't crying, wasn't, wasn't.

Please please pleasepleasepleaseplease–

But Tom couldn't hear him, because the bond was gone.

His head shattered like glass, and was he screaming? He wasn't, he wasn't; it was the thunder in his head making all that noise; it was the lightning that blinded the world for an eternity and it was the lightning that made him wonder if it'd all ended, if he'd lost his body because it had thrown its head back and was making these noises that couldn't possibly be coming from him.

The thunder had left him shaking, and the tremor ran through him all over. It'd left him deaf and seeing ghosts, lost in the kicked up dust storm, but it would pass, it would, and he just needed to wait for the sun to emerge–

"Robe me," a voice said, but Harry wasn't listening, because the thunderstorm was still overhead and his mind was still clouded. He could hardly open his eyes – hardly knew the difference between eyes open and eyes closed.

"Ah, our _guest,"_ the voice said through the haze, his other words lost, "Harry _Potter._ But your little trick doesn't work anymore, does it?"

A hand reached out to him and he instinctively shied away, still lost in his nightmare world. It paused, as if amused – and then stretched a single finger to brush his cheek.

Spark.

Not a bright, brilliant, dynamite shower of sparks, but a pitiful thing that hardly made any light at all. But it was a spark. A moment where the clouds cleared and then Harry realised–

–the sunlight had never been so bright, had it?–

–and how could he be feeling so full yet empty, feeling like he was riding the wings of a dragon when he was also slogging through the mud, his blood leaving tracks behind him…

Was that Tom? The emptiness in him bloomed. _Filled._

Hadn't Tom been gone? Didn't Tom say goodbye? Wasn't Tom cutting them off–? Wouldn't Tom be so angry when he realised that whatever he'd tried hadn't worked?

Harry felt the instant Tom realised Harry was still there. It _burst_ over the bond in a spray of _angerdisgusthelplessnesshurt_ and Harry shrunk away. Tom felt like an echo – was it still broken? Was it–? but then the anger flared again and Harry hid away from his thoughts.

In front of him, in the real world, Voldemort had paused, his red eyes seeming to look but not see.

Oh. Was Harry going to die now? It was so much easier to think _he was going to live_ knowing that Tom was still there and that Harry still had a chance.

Then–

Then the world stopped.

Then he caught sight of Lord Voldemort's hand and suddenly the thunderstorm was nothing. The graveyard was nothing. The tournament, the spells, the school and the train and the owl and the godfathers and _everything_ was nothing. It wasn't like the pain, which had drawn him in and trapped him close and swallowed his world. This was rushing _outwards,_ until it couldn't be his body, it couldn't be his fate, it couldn't be _his_ life.

That couldn't be his writing, the scrawl that scratched, " _No_."

In his head he could feel Tom's– _Voldemort's_ distant echo of curiosity because Harry's shock must've come as a heart-stopping wave.

That couldn't be. That couldn't be.

In an eerie mirror of his own hand, an eerie parody, he watched the familiar " _No"_ appear and reappear and stain that bony white skin with black. He couldn't tear his eyes away. All this time, it had been _this_ man. This killer. This madman. A sudden movement, and Voldemort had withdrawn, eyes narrowed, and Harry could feel a distant distaste flowing through the bond.

The Dark Lord spun away, and when he gestured for Wormtail to come to him, Harry saw that he had Conjured a pair of black gloves, woven from the sky with trimmings of stars that seemed to shift and stir.

Harry still couldn't seem to breathe. This man had murdered his parents and stolen his life. This man had killed and ordered killed all good women and men, children and infants. This man was a cold killer who cared for _nothing,_ who hated soulmates and didn't that just all make sense?

This man was also his Tom and Harry thought his heart was going to break in his chest.

Voldemort's irritation throbbed in his head because Harry's distress must've been too loud. It seemed to say _be quiet._

"My Death Eaters," Voldemort called when cloaked men began to appear around the edges of the graveyard, "how wonderful to see you again after your _years_ of cowardice."

"My Lord!" one of the cried, throwing themselves at his feet. Harry could feel Voldemort's indifference, his disgust. What a cruel man. How could he possibly be tied to Harry? How could Harry have ever pitied and wanted to find and longed for _this_ man?

(But what about the boy in the Chamber that Harry had fallen in- _seen_?)

He didn't want to believe this was happening. Maybe Voldemort should kill him after all. Wouldn't that all just be perfectly fitting?

 _Crack!_ Another cloaked figure Apparated in, and Voldemort paused, his red eyes seeming to spark. _Crack!_ Harry could hear them appearing behind him. _Crack! Crack! Crack!_

The ropes fell around him and he still didn't want to believe this was happening. He fell to the ground, landing on his knees, the world shifting.

 _Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!_

There were people Apparating in. He could see members of the Ministry, were those Aurors? And was that Ron holding Rita Skeeter by her hair while Lupin Apparated them in?

Voldemort slowly turned to survey the force that had surrounded him and his Death Eaters. Harry could see the black-robed men in their white masks shifting from foot to foot. There were too many of the Ministry for Voldemort's force to fight, but the man's bloodless lips curled into a smile.

"Karkaroff, was it?" he asked, his words ringing in the silence. No one answered. The Aurors just held their chins up higher and readjusted their holds on their wands. "In that case, I might have to postpone my meeting for a little while." His smile grew wider.

There was a terrible tearing noise as his wand slashed upwards and suddenly the people around Harry were firing off spells but the burst of colours _slowed_ midair and shrunk until they were snuffed into nothing. Then Harry saw that this pink-haired woman's foot was caught mid-air and the man beside her, halfway through a step, was also frozen in his pose.

"Ah," Voldemort said, satisfaction thrumming in Harry's head, "I'm sure you all think this should be the extent of my power, but as it so happens, I have another source to draw from."

His wand cut the air again at the same instant Harry felt like the life was syphoned out from his chest. If he hadn't been frozen in place, he would've crumpled. A glimmering silver trail was left after the wand, and it hovered there, stretching outwards until it _split_ and it was a cut in the world. Harry could see the other side, a crackling fire and dark wood– was that the conference room in _Malfoy Manor?_

For a moment his world went dark – like a line going dead – when his energy surged out from him in another wave and he flickered in and out of consciousness. The cut, though, the cut in the world– it _burst_ white wings on each side and an elegant, white wispy head uncurled like a Patronus in the familiar arch of a phoenix.

Voldemort's laugh was high and cold. "In being reborn, it seems that the world decided I required another _soulmate._ " He spat the word. "And what are soulmates to be for, but used? Although– this one– _impeccable_ taste, hm?"

He was lying. He must have been lying. He needed to save face to maintain that anti-soulmate campaign he'd started and that lie he'd told about his soulmate being dead. He _knew_ it'd always been Harry, had only ever been Harry, and please let him still be lying about–

Had it always been so dark? Harry couldn't think anymore. He was clinging to a cliff.

With a wave of his hand, the Death Eaters started towards the cut in the world _too slowly_ , stepping through the doorway while Harry and Aurors could only stand there and watch. Or in Harry's case, kneel there while the dark, unconscious periods grew longer and wonder if anyone had noticed the constant glaze in his eyes. Voldemort seemed to sense his soulmate's drain, because he sent sharp glares to any Death Eaters who straggled, and as the last one stepped through, he released it instantly and watched the doorway dissipate like mist.

He didn't even spare a glance for Harry.

Then he turned on the spot and disappeared in a _crack!_ and suddenly everyone in the graveyard was talking in a scattergun burst of noise and moving to catch Harry when the darkness came, and he hit the ground, hard.

–––

Someone was carrying him.

Mumble, mumble, voices, the feeling of Tom at the back of his mind, sway of hurried steps, and was that Mad-Eye Moody?

"Voldemort's back," Harry slurred through the haze, "he's back, and the whole Ministry saw him."

"That wasn't the Ministry, boy." It was definitely Moody, with that low gravelly growl. "That was the Order of the Phoenix."

The… Order of the Phoenix? "Wuzzat," Harry managed.

Moody muttered something but Harry couldn't quite catch his words. He felt boneless and limp, like he was waking from a terrible fever. There was a click of a door and they emerged into Moody's office.

Somewhere in his head, alarm bells were going off. "Pomfrey?"

"Sorry, kid." Moody said, and suddenly everything spun because Harry was thrown across the room and there was a wand pointed at him. "I can't believe the my Lord failed to kill you, you _brat._ Do you know how hard it was to get you through the tournament?"

Harry didn't understand. His life had been torn up by the roots all to much today, and he was winded from thudding into the wall. "M-Moody? You're an _Auror._ " Where was his damn _wand?_ He needed clarity back, but his arms felt like lead and he realised that even if he found his wand, he would be too exhausted to cast anything.

" _Alastor_ is _,_ but I'm not Moody now, am I?" the not-Moody grinned, taking a step closer, and then he yelled " _Avada Kedavra!"_

Harry rolled to the side, abandoning his scrabble for his wand as the green spell crashed into the wall. His head filled with a panic that wasn't his, a huge, cresting, swell, demanding to be let in.

Moody's grin grew frenzied as he let loose another Killing Curse. Harry saw the green flash, heard the rush, too late, and there was nothing he could do. Just retreated into his head and let Voldemort's panic in, let it be the last thing he ever felt.

A bubble materialised around him and the _Avada Kedavra_ hit the side and _shattered._ Harry felt a resonation of pain through the bond.

Not-Moody froze.

"So that's how it is, eh?" Not-Moody said, voice dropping to a growl, " _Love._ Let's see how much your soulmate ' _loves'_ you."

Then came another Killing Curse, which also broke against the shield, and the bubble had levitated Harry up and he couldn't bloody _move._

"Your soulmate's strong, Potter, I'll give you that. But she can't be strong _enough._ "

And another Killing Curse, and another, and another, and each time it broke on the surface of the bubble, and each time Harry felt a ringing pain through the bond. He– He hated Voldemort, hated him with such ingrained loathing, but he didn't hate his _Tom._ He couldn't hurt that boy that he'd once known.

Harry felt for that panic, that pain in his head, and pushed Voldemort _away._ He could die on his own without hurting– hurting anyone else. Even if it was Voldemort. With his mental shove, the bubble around him shimmered and disappeared, and Not-Moody's smile widened.

"Did she die, now?" he asked, and Harry tensed to dodge if another Killing Curse came. "My Lord praises that emptiness, you know… If you're strong, you can _stand_ it.

My sweetheart lies at the bottom of the ocean," he said, and then he smiled, and Harry had never realised just how twisted this man really was. "And so will you."

Then the door flew open and Dumbledore was there, announced that Severus had placed a Tracking Charm on Harry long ago, and the rest was history.

–––

"You," Harry said, his voice catching in his throat. Crouch was lying unconscious in the corner of the room, and Dumbledore had opened the chest containing the real Moody. Harry tried again, but it came out more as a screech. This long– " _Yeeeuuu–_ "

Dumbledore looked up as if finally aware Harry was trying to say something.

Harry really didn't want to shout, but it exploded from him anyway. "You _knew!"_ he yelled. "You– You knew it _all this time,_ and you– you–" his breaths were coming too fast, and he could feel Voldemort in the back of his head and he just _could not_ linger on that now. "Is this why you told me to care for him? To love him?" The world was sinking around him.

"Harry," Dumbledore said reprovingly, with a frown.

"Do you think _blind_ love is enough to _blind_ what _he's_ _DONE?! WHAT HE'S DONE TO ME?!"_ He shouted as if he could rid himself of this– this _cruel_ play on fate, his throat raw from his scream.

"Harry," Dumbledore said again, "if you had known, would you have ever even considered loving him?"

"You know the answer to that," Harry spat, still coming down from his white-hot rage. "You don't need to put words in my mouth."

"But it makes it no less untrue. I've given you the chance to love him, unbiased, before–"

"What the _fuck_ do you really want?!" Harry snapped, "God, what bloody game are you playing now? What do you _want_ from this?"

"To bring two souls scattered throughout time together," his headmaster answered simply. "As they should be."

"Not to defeat _Voldemort?_ Not to just _defeat the Dark?_ " Harry sneered. "Not for more of your _cursed_ plans _?_ "

"No." Dumbledore replied, ever mild. "Harry, you and I were the ones who created Voldemort." Harry's eyes widened. Dumbledore might as well have hit him. "If my goal was to defeat him, I would've done so long ago."

"You made him," Harry echoed bitterly. " _You–_ What did you do to _him?_ Put him through as many obscure trials as you could, didn't you? You probably used and played him like a toy. No wonder he hates you."

Dumbledore seemed unfazed. "Rather, I saved his life and gave him a second chance to continue waiting for you. The one who drove him mad was you, not I. I merely kept him alive."

Harry paused, and he was– so filled with loathing and betrayal. He didn't want Dumbledore's idiotic logic, and he especially didn't want Dumbledore telling him that Harry shouldn't be angry because this was _his_ fault. That he was supposed to control, somehow, when he was born.

"Yeah, it's all my fault, isn't it?" he said, acid on his tongue.

"It is not your _fault._ " Dumbledore replied. "But you are the cause–"

"You're a _cruel_ man." Harry snarled. "How many other people have you used to misery? _You_ set me up to kill Quirrell. _You_ kept Tom living fifty years in loathing. _You_ let people think you're doing them a kindness, when actually– just look at Hagrid. Or _Filch!_ Hagrid's life is filled with students tormenting and laughing–"

"I have all faith that he will pull through." Dumbledore said, slightly sadly. "As will you and Tom, otherwise I would've had to have killed two of this world's greatest wizards."

Harry glared and then ploughed on. "Okay, then, how about Filch? He's here, a Squib, stuck with all these kids having what he'll never have–"

"Argus Filch… his wife's maiden name was Norris," and all words from Harry fell flat as the implications dawned. "You know that soulmates can continue living when the other dies if they have a child. Argus did not, but they did raise a cat together. He's named each of them, since, after her. In any other place, Harry, Argus would be in St Mungo's. Here he forgets, in his glee."

And then Harry just had no words, until finally it all came crashing down, his rage and anger and everything fell like a crumbling tower. His soulmate was Lord Voldemort, and that was that. The murderer of his parents, and wasn't that just ironic? It was Voldemort's fault that he had killed Lily and James Potter, but it was Harry's fault that Voldemort was as he was.

Harry just let go of the anger in one, long, sigh, and slumped by one the walls to cast his eyes upwards in defeat. Maybe he'd find a way. Maybe he'd find a way to reach into that loathing and hatred and and pull that drowned boy Tom out from underneath.

Distantly, he became aware of Voldemort's bubbling anger. He knew why Voldemort was angry. Because he'd instinctively, against all of his loathing, been pulled to save Harry, to take the Avada Kedavra several times for him. Through all of these years when Voldemort had grown himself 'strong' and independent, without a soulmate, suddenly he was pulled in just like every other.

And of course his Occlumency hadn't worked, because he'd taken Harry's _blood_ and tied them even closer together.

It was all clear to him, now.

He looked down at his hands, as if suddenly remembering them, and they were – to his relief – still sparse. Voldemort's soul was still split, so it wouldn't have been completely mended. That was good. Harry didn't want Voldemort knowing who he was, not yet.

But with Voldemort's excellent Legilimency, apparently he could still write on Harry's hands. Harry sat there, Dumbledore pulling Alastor Moody out of the trunk, staring at the newest writing.

" _Do not do that again._ "

Harry could almost laugh.

" _I am a king,"_ Voldemort wrote slowly, carefully, " _and will not have you pull me down._ "

Voldemort really had never realised how insane and stunted he'd become – how he'd lost Tom the more he became Voldemort. Of course Harry didn't intentionally _get hit by the Avada Kedavra._ Voldemort was insane.

Harry scrunched up his eyes and tried to write back. " _But,"_ he wrote, and it took so tediously long, but he knew the Dark Lord was waiting, because he could feel the expectancy on the other side,

" _even a king is bound to the board."_

* * *

a/n i spelt squib as squid and it just became my highlight of the day

wow im lame

also i hope you know why this story is named what it is, now. if you need an even bigger clue, the doc i've got for this story is saved as: "you got given a second chance and so you became a megalomaniac?" (what tom did with his 'first chance' was implied somewhere in one of the chapters. you probably all know though, lol)


	8. book 5 start

The world started again in the hospital, where a ginger-haired boy stood at the foot of a bed, shifting from foot to foot and holding a little jar in his hand.

Harry couldn't muster the strength to tell him to go away. His mind was bogged down with thoughts of Voldemort, of Tom, of the two distant entities that he refused to consider one. What on earth was he going to do with this revelation that had destroyed his world and tore it inside out? He couldn't think of his parents without thinking about the Dark Lord, the murderer, his soulmate. He couldn't sit there and read the _Daily Prophet_ without thinking, somehow, that it was all his fault. Suddenly everything rotated around that one, final, fact; it curled there like a dreadful black hole in the center of an expanding universe. Everything came back to _this._ Lord Voldemort was his soulmate.

People always turned to Harry when 'Dark' things happened: when the Basilisk was let loose, when Sirius escaped, when Quirrell made pain spike up his scar. How was he supposed to be The-Boy-Who-Lived when it was because he was the Dark Lord's _soulmate?_ How was he supposed to look Neville in the eye, knowing he was the reason Neville's parents lay unthinking in St. Mungo's?

"Harry," the boy at the foot of his bed said again, and Harry suddenly realised he'd left Ron there for far too long. "Uh– if you're not feeling well right now I can come back later, but–"

"No, no," Harry said; it'd be good if he could take his mind off Tom for an instant. "Talk." He hoped he didn't sound pushy and commanding. Mostly, he thought he sounded weary.

"Well, um, basically I'm just really really sorry," it came out in rush, like he'd been bottling it up for too long, "and I thought you wouldn't be, y'know– well– I thought you wouldn't just want to hear me _saying_ sorry, so I went looking for Rita Skeeter because she was being a huge bloody bat to you, and–" he held up the jar, where a curious little beetle was buzzing around in indignation, "I guess I caught her."

Harry leaned forwards, more interested than he'd otherwise have been. "How?"

Ron seemed to _beam_ because his frien— Harry, was proud of him. "I basically found her and threatened her until she transformed and tried to get away, and I caught her like that. I kind of– you know all those books you leave around all the time about Animagi? I sort of got the idea from your books."

"You've been reading my books?" Harry asked quietly.

"No! I've been taking more out of the library because I wanted to get better. Like, in class. Like how you and Hermione are. And–" Ron cut off and continued as if he hadn't mentioned that last 'and'. "But yeah. Basically I guess I'm– or at least I'll _try_ not to be... a right old prat to you anymore. I guess, I mean, your life really isn't that good either, Harry. You should see yourself now. I don't think I actually want that anymore."

No lies.

Harry looked closely at him, and now that Ron was talking and had shed a bit of his nervousness, he saw that there was this smile that kept creeping onto that freckled face. Maybe it was because Harry couldn't get his mind off bloody _soulmates,_ but— "Did you find your soulmate?"

A myriad of emotions flickered through Ron's eyes, vanishing as quick as they came. "Yeah," he said, and then his smile returned, unhidden. "And I wouldn't give her up for the world." His happiness was brimming with _love._

Wasn't happiness blinding? Hermione, now Ron. Soon it would be everybody. What a perfect world, where each and every wizard and witch was matched with someone equally as perfect. Except Harry. What exactly was he going to do? He knew he'd buckle under the weight of this great secret eventually. He couldn't live with and through the Light everyday, lying to them, knowing, in the pit of his heart, that it was all his fault.

Merlin, he _knew_ it was all just a great– great– _travesty_. He watched Ron keep talking with a odd sort of detachment while his mind tried again and again to accept the new truth. Some sort of fate had paired Tom with Harry, the unborn Harry, and it had come to be a whole, vicious, cycle.

Ron left the room, taking the jar with him and promising to give it to Hermione to hold, while Harry lay there lost in his thoughts. Was Harry supposed to try to turn Voldemort to the Light? Like hell that would happen. Was Harry supposed to use this against Voldemort? Was Voldemort beyond redemption? Was he already so, so, broken that Harry's duty, now, as his soulmate, was to end him? Harry didn't want to kill anyone again, but if he had to… if Voldemort had ended too many lives already… Harry would do what he had to do. He would do what he could do. Would killing himself kill Voldemort? He wasn't sure it would, because Voldemort had already lived as a half for so many years and still survived. But could he manipulate the bond; use it to try bring Tom back, or use it to get close to Voldemort and then tear his soul apart.

The truth was that Harry didn't know. He would do whichever one, ultimately, was easier, and in the meantime bear a mountain of a burden.

Hermione came to visit him, later, and he asked her if she'd heard about the incident in the graveyard. Hadn't Ministry workers been there? Wasn't news out about Voldemort's return?

No, apparently.

Dumbledore told him _even_ later, in his warm light-filled office, that they were members of the "Order of the Phoenix" — a group that had been central to resisting Voldemort at the start; the end; and now, the return. Their goal was to mitigate Voldemort's damage, apparently. To keep him contained, like a fireplace did a wildfire. Harry supposed they had done well enough this time. But couldn't they testify that to the whole world? They were trusted and respected people. Why wouldn't they announce to the Prophet that Voldemort had returned?

"Fear can rule men, Harry. They are driven into irrationality by it; Cornelius, especially. He clutches onto his love for his office and refutes all that defies it. No Pensieve nor word will convince him of Voldemort's return. He must see it and recognise the danger with his own eyes, and before then... we'd best not make enemies we could do without."

After the Headmaster told him that they'd attempt to pass the word around, in whispers and rumours, Harry let it go. Yeah, Voldemort was back, but some dark fearful part of Harry was grateful the world didn't know. No one would talk about Voldemort. Harry could try to ignore it.

"Harry— your mother also left you a powerful enchantment in her blood. Returning to your relative's home renews it, and it will prevent Voldemort from touching you while he means harm. But Voldemort did not rise to power without great cunning, and so a number of the Order will still be watching over you over the summer."

Nodding and promising to keep that in mind, he wandered back to the Quidditch fields he'd quit and saw the Gryffindor team flying around, laughing, Ginny in their midst. Ron was probably off fraternising with his soulmate. Hermione, Harry knew, was with Malfoy, drawing up terms to constrain Rita with. Harry'd refused to take part in the proceedings. He couldn't deal with that right now. He just needed time to think.

The Astronomy tower was always empty — not the corridors where soul couples liked to sneak into the nooks and crannies, but certainly the blustering, cold, battlements. The whole of Hogwarts was on view from there, and Harry couldn't help but think how pitifully less it meant to him, now. Would he even live to graduate?

Voldemort stirred at the back of his head. The man'd been feeling irritated all day. Harry didn't even have to guess what about.

" _... power…"_

" _... powerless…"_

" _... power…"_

" _... powerless…"_

" _Ignore it. Later."_ in cursedly beautiful black script.

Harry wondered if Voldemort would ever stop obsessing over power and the lack of it when it came to having a soulmate. Throughout the days, it went like this: Voldemort would feel irritated at Harry's existence and his inability to prevent it, try to quell his irritance and redirect his anger towards his minions, but have bubble back up roil in perpetual anger.

The door to the top of the Astronomy tower flew open behind him, and there was a high giggle and then an "oops!". A pair of fifth-year students saw Harry standing there and quickly retreated, laughing with each other and apologising. Everyone was happy.

Everyone around him seemed to be happy. Even though Voldemort was back and even though Harry's life had fallen apart.

Harry watched them go wordlessly. Then he gripped for that nebulous feeling of anger in his head, and gripped _hard_. He hated this. He hated it all. So Voldemort had to take his parents _and_ his future, too?

And if he got a warm wave in return, like the reassuring squeeze of a hand, followed a deep-seated feeling of shame, disgust, weakness, then, well... Harry would jerk back in shock and then laugh one of those self-deprecating, hating, laughs. He'd laugh at how tragic his life was. Here was his arch nemesis, a mass murderer, unwittingly trying to _comfort_ him. Was Harry supposed to feel disgusted in return? Shocked? Or, Gods forbid, _comforted?_

Mostly he just felt helpless to be played as the Gods wanted him, and felt the residue of Voldemort's distaste.

" _Stop."_ his hands read, " _Stop. Stop. I hate you."_

So Harry sat there, watching over his school and home, trying to pretend nothing was happening at all. Not in the corridors, where he pointedly avoided Neville, where he felt like he'd throw up if he heard people talking about anything involving the Dark, where people were just so blindingly _happy,_ where people could act like the world hadn't changed at all. No. Nothing was happening. Nothing at all.

—

He knew it'd happened the night before, lying in bed in the Dursley's home, because euphoria had surged up in his head and his hands were flooded with ink.

"On today's news," Harry heard the television say. "A group of terrorists bombed the streets of London. Witnesses claim that fireworks were set off by arsonists. Although there has been extensive property damage, there are no reports of wounded or killed."

Of course not, Harry thought with a sickening dread. Muggles wouldn't be picking up the magical dead.

—

Dudley appeared surprised as he tried to get a rise out of Harry. The summer was searing hot, a heat wave rolling over the household, sending Vernon sweating in front of the television and the kitchen into sweltering heights. Harry had been advised to stay inside the house for his safety, but staying inside was a recipe for disaster, with the irritable Dursleys and little to do except for listen to news reports for any hint of Voldemort. He was itching to be out and about, with his friend's evasive messages (they were at a safehouse too, apparently, and it made him feel so stupidly alone; they wouldn't tell him what actually happened with that 'terrorist attack') and all these emotions boiling in his head.

To be fair, though, he probably had a better radar about what Voldemort was doing than they did. It was the loneliness that got to him, but that happened year after year, didn't it? Nothing new. Except– no Tom this time.

He could feel people watching him when he left. It didn't really matter, either way. So what if a bored 'Order' member saw Harry sitting outside the house and staring into apparently nothing? His hands were wrapped, as usual. While he itched to take off the wrappings and watch Voldemort think, it seemed to be a self-destructive activity, because then he'd feel miserable and angry and then Voldemort would involuntarily comfort him and then feel disgusted and Harry would feel conflicted and—

It was a vicious spiral. He just tried to ignore it. It wasn't as though he could do anything here.

"Hey, freak!" Dudley yelled again. One of the fat wads beside him bent down to pick up stones. "Aren't you listening?!"

A rock bounced off his arm. Harry was sitting on a swing set. Not swinging, just sitting. And apparently Dudley had no better amusement.

"Are you deaf now too?" his cousin sneered. His friends cracked their knuckles threateningly. "Useless."

No, Harry wasn't. He was so useful he resulted in the creation of a Dark Lord and killed hundreds and thousands.

Dudley stomped up to him, stomp stomp stomp — Harry watched him come — and then a meaty hand shot out to grab Harry's glasses. Harry's own hand came up in a blur to stop him. The glasses weren't to be touched.

Normally, at this point, the Order member on watch came in, disguised, to intervene. But that didn't seem to be happening today. Were they just getting a kick out of seeing Harry get bullied?

"You really want to do this, Dudley?" Harry challenged the pig-like face that was a little too close to his. "I think you're forgetting what _I_ can do to make your life hell."

A crow cawed, loudly, and Dudley jumped and paled. What beautifully dramatic timing. Harry wondered if the Order member was there after all. "Hey Dudley!" one of his lackeys called. "Why don't we go hit Jono instead? He'll do our homework and give us food and stuff. This isn't fun!"

There were a few chimed "yeahs". Dudley ignored them.

"Oh yeah?" the fat boy sneered in Harry's face. "You think you can?"

"Wouldn't take much. I'd just take away your snickers bars."

"You're not _allowed._ " the boy said, face starting to grow red.

"You know what I _am_ allowed to do? _Magic,"_ he hissed, watching beady eyes narrow, "in self defense."

"No you're _not._ Mummy says you can't."

Harry glanced over Dudley's towering form. Dudley's gang members were nowhere to be seen.

"Well she's delusional. What would you know? Look at you. You're so desperate to prove that you're better than me because you're not _sure_ you're better, _Dudders._ "

The thing about being fat was that you had greater momentum. So even if Harry's hand came up to stop the fist that came, it wasn't enough. Like trying to stop a rock with a piece of paper. His glasses went scattering across the bark of the swing set and Harry had to cling onto the chain to stay seated.

"Who's better now?!"

Where was the member of the elusive bloody 'Order'?

Who cared. Harry was feeling vindictive. He wanted to both dish out hurt and feel hurt. This was _normal_. This was like last year's summer, and the year before that, and the year before.

"Come on!" Harry laughed. "You're so pathetic that even your friends've run away! Do you _know_ how sad this really is? Does this make you feel powerful? Does it?!"

He suddenly had the eerie feeling that one of those sentences he'd just yelled had appear on Voldemort's skeletal white hand.

"I bet it bloody does," Harry continued uncaringly, watching the rage build in that scrunching face, "so keep pretending you're actually _worth_ anything–"

He let go of the chain at the same moment Dudley lunged. They rolled across the bark of the swings, Harry scrabbling for his wand, his cousin furious, his meaty hands beating over and over again. Dudley was a weight on him, dragging him down, kicking and swinging.

His wand freed itself and he pointed it at Dudley's nose.

"Don't move." he warned. Dudley sneered, but the punches were held there midair.

"This isn't self-defense." his cousin replied. "You can't use that out of home."

"Don't push me," Harry said, half because he could see the hesitation in Dudley's eyes. Slowly, he felt Voldemort rise in the back of his mind like a wraith in an arctic wind. The feeling swept up through him in a trail of cold fingers and reminded him of a dark sun that stole light.

His cousin stiffened and Harry's grip on his wand steadied. "It's not me." Dudley said. "You're the one who's weak."

"Yeah. Nice joke. Grow a pair of _eyes._ Who's _scared_ right now?" Harry said, backing away and stooping at one point to scoop up his glasses. Dudley drifted after them, the two locked in a standstill. Balls to Dudley.

He stepped out of the playground and was still backing away, holding Dudley at wandpoint when the other boy sneered, "Yeah? Then who's Tom?"

 _No._ Violent jerk. "What?" He sounded confused, disarmed, and immediately regretted saying anything at all when he saw his cousin's eyes light up.

" _Tom._ " He put on a high-pitched mocking voice. " _No, Tom!_ in the middle of the night like a baby."

Suddenly, Dudley was _right there_ , smirking widely _._ And he slammed his fist into the Harry. They went down onto the concrete, snarling and fighting with no sort of finesse at all.

"You have no bloody _right_ to talk about—" my soulmate, my killer, _a dead boy_ , "—him like _that_." Harry snarled. Dudley didn't know about Tom, didn't know anything, it wasn't fair that Harry was so goddamn _angry_ , but he didn't care. He wasn't going to tell him cousin that Tom— that Tom was important. That Tom couldn't be joked about.

There was a difference between fighting fist-to-fist and sending a spell towards somebody. There was something primal about fighting there in the street. Every scratch was a victory, and every hit he landed ran through him and set his blood to boil even though Harry wasn't usually one to _want_ that fiery brawler-rage in his veins.

Dudley caught his jaw with a fist but when Harry went down and rolled back up, hands clenched, anticipating the next swing, Dudley hesitated, looking pale, and... stepped away.

Then Harry realised the fire driving him was going cold.

"What are you doing?" The boy's voice started to become shrill. "Stop it!"

Was Voldemort—? Harry felt it too, filling him up with inky-black icewater. "I'm not," he gritted, but he went unheard when Dudley began to shout.

"Stop it!" the boy yelled, clamping his hands to his ears. He hunched over. "Stop!"

A voice faded in, radio static. His heaving breath gave way to shivers. Radio knob turned— the static became clear. It was screaming, familiar. " _Not Harry!"_

Dementors.

It slunk into his mind, a deep bone-rattling dread, the sort of dread when you're alone at the bottom of the stairs and anything could be in the dark. Irrational, primal. Fear gripped him in claws and he was so terrified he couldn't breathe and the world started to grow dark from the corners. Dementors. Here, _here,_ where the muggles— where was the Order member, how—?

He made a strangled noise, the beginning of what would be a feeble Patronus, but it was drowned out by what rushed into his lungs like icy black lakewater. Somewhere, he'd fallen to the ground, wand clattering to the concrete by him. His mother was screaming. Voldemort was telling her to stand aside, the silly girl. She better stand aside. She begged, Harry's just a boy, he's just a little boy, you can't kill him, he's—

Avada Kedavra. Dead. Harry was in a tunnel, a dark deep tunnel filled with fears, and the only thing the light showed was that scene, playing over and over again in the distance.

Someone was pounding from inside his head, a whirlwind of razor-sharp anger, glinting with knife-edge panic. _Voldemort can't produce a patronus._ Frustration. But Harry couldn't tell if that was Vo— Tom's, or, if it was his own fear that oozed over everything else.

Harry hadn't even realised it was all dark now, and that through the darkness and the slow-slinking wind, a rotted hand was trailing up his neck. It slid up his chin; flaked, gouged skin rough and dragging against his own. It cupped his cheek and he heard a long dry rattle — death-rattle — like cut up esophagus and lungs, where the ribs shook with how thin they were and the skin shivered with each long breath.

 _Plague._

Dementor's Kiss. A kiss that would kill. A lot like Voldemort, Harry thought. A lot like Tom. The images in his head shifted to the graveyard, where it'd hurt like hellfire and his world was ruined the instant he realised who his soulmate was.

Tom in his head surged, and something like black smoke began to build in Harry's hands. Harry didn't see it. Only felt the stones in the graveyard again, the deep crushing fear and pain he'd felt when their bond had broken. Fear. He never wanted to feel like that again. So lost and alone…

The smoke curled into the shape of a snake. A snake and a skull, and it dripped with twisted magic.

The Dementor stopped. The tunnel vanished, but the feel of dripping sewers, corpses, split-open swollen mothers, the dust and decay of a graveyard, remained in his mind. Harry could see grey-loose dead skin and a formless hood in front of him, but his heart was beating in his throat as though it was half-way gone alongside his soul and Voldemort was roaring in his head. There was a smoky sigil in his hands.

A crooked peeling finger touched his face again. Emotions leapt into his head: _apologies, grovelling, mistakes, no, fealty._

Voldemort trembled like a tightly coiled storm of anger.

The Dementor drew away and the darkness coiled around it in a cowl. Harry felt like he'd woken from a nightmare, its lingering touch still clinging. Dudley whimpered somewhere. It, slowly, dissipated with the wind. Harry tried to stand and fell, cursing when his knees hit the concrete.

Tom was on him in an instant. Worry. Anger. More anger. Disguised worry.

How had Dementors been there? And moreover, why had they _stopped_ drawing out Harry's soul, stopped pulling it out like a gutting fish hook and hauling Voldemort after him-

Oh.

That was probably why. He looked down at his hands, where the smoke snake disappeared into a wisp.

Had Voldemort ordered this? If the Dementor — (thinking about it reminded him of its _smell._ His stomach lurched) — if it refused to hurt Voldemort, then it was probably under Voldemort's control. Fuck. What if Voldemort deduced that the same Dementors he'd ordered had targeted his soulmate, then? No. No, Harry would feel it if Voldemort realised. The Dark Lord was too mad to be that logical.

He attempted to stand again, this time with more success. His feet were unsteady on the street as his mind attempted to reboot. Okay. Damage control. Any Muggle could've been looking out their window. Actually, they would've felt the Dementor's icy touch too and fallen. He looked back at his bandaged hands, felt a familiar anger pulsing in his head, and picked at one of the wrappings where it was coming loose. There was a glimpse of a word, " _-diot._ ", then the anger morphed into its usual deprecation. Voldemort was angry at his soulmate. Angry at himself. Angry at the world for being so chained. A little dash of hate. But for whom?

Harry shook his head. Nothing he could do. He was starting to wonder if there was _anything_ he could do. Voldemort was known for being close-minded. Maybe when he got back to Hogwarts he could look for rituals that'd strengthen the bond so they could communicate more efficiently. But then Voldemort might discover it was _Harry._ The Boy-Who-Lived.

Those scrambled thoughts weren't for now. He couldn't just stand there on the street.

He padded over to the boy who was shaking, heaving Dudley up. Dudders was bloody _heavy._ And Harry would have so much explaining to do. Gods. What a disaster.

He looked around again, at the innocently empty street, and then dragged his cousin back to his home.

—

Petunia screamed as soon as he stepped foot over threshold. "Dudders!" she cried, rushing forwards and sounding faint. "Oh, Dudders!" But her voice morphed into a screech as she caught sight of Harry. " _What did you do?!_ "

"Nothing," he panted. "Nothing. Just saved him from something coming to hurt me."

"What did you say?" Vernon appeared like a thunderclap over Petunia's shoulder, face contorted with anger.

"I said–" Harry began, but he knew it'd be no use. Dudley was just starting to stir, Petunia was white-faced and pale-eyed, and his uncle was a tick away from erupting.

" _Get out!"_ Harry shrunk away, dropping his cousin. "You dare bring danger to my son? Look at all that we've done for you, and you'd- you'd _dare hurt him_ -" His words were cut off by the door slamming behind Harry as he turned and sprinted out of the house.

It was degrading, crawling through the grass (not that anyone could see), but he did it anyway, tucking his legs in front of him as he listened to Dudley whimper through the open window. He'd just slip in sometime when Vernon fell asleep at the television and Petunia was busy in the kitchen. And forget about having dinner tonight.

—

It was unpleasant, the Dursley's yelling ringing in his ears with the baking heat and Harry sitting in his room with his head in his hands. He evidently wasn't quite as good at sneaking as he thought. Not without the cloak.

Voldemort was feeling prickly, a swelling ball of unease and uncertainty. Voldemort. Tom. What was he going to do? Just hope that somehow Voldemort grew fond of his soulmate and realised he shouldn't rise to power again? Harry snorted. Yeah. That was happening real soon.

He unwrapped the bandages. They were stifling and sweaty and just generally disgusting. The Dudleys didn't want to waste 'good resources' by replacing them regularly. The hands were empty. Harry had the nagging suspicion Voldemort's pale skeleton-white hands read " _Hot_ ". Maybe " _Dementor"._

Instead, he focused his mind on that snake-like face and its bloody eyes, only to realise he really didn't know what to say. _Um,_ he thought instead. He felt like an idiot, heat that wasn't from the weather rising in his cheeks.

There was a bloated pause where Harry wondered if the words had turned up at all. Then Voldemort's uncertainty snapped into a clear cut knife of _knowing._

For an instant Harry's stomach dropped. Had he been found out?

" _A tool._ " Voldemort traced out on Harry's hand with his elegant sloped writing. " _Tools are created to be used. Yet, as an owner, one must also maintain the condition of the tool._ " Another pause. " _ **Weapon**_ _._ _At most pitiful, decoration._ " The wizard radiated a sort of smugness. Content. Finally, he'd settled on an acceptable definition of the issue that'd been plaguing him.

Harry internally bristled, his sharp tang of relief quickly obscured. As if someone would willingly take the Avada Kedavra a few times for a bloody _tool._ Voldemort was just conveniently overlooking a few key facts. Harry was _not_ a 'weapon' to be used, not by the media, not by the Wizarding World, and Voldemort was delusional for thinking so.

His soulmate's content slowed to contain flickers of boiling anger.

Harry wanted to reply with someone like "except you can throw away a tool you don't like", but it might've prompted Voldemort into actually trying to throw Harry out. _Again._ Though — he thought about the scroll lying at the bottom of his trunk — Voldemort had done it once. Probably accidentally, or maybe he was weak enough to not want to kill himself again soon.

His eyes roamed the ceiling where the white was growing over slightly yellow. Voldemort had been angry about getting a soulmate again, yes, but he'd probably stop feeling that fury because he'd deluded himself into thinking of a soulmate as a tool to be used. Harry felt a sudden hopelessness. How was he supposed to save Tom, defeat Voldemort, if Voldemort didn't even… open himself up to Harry?

That sounded absolutely, despicably, idealistic. As if the greatest mass murderer would give a heart to heart with anybody. As if he could love anybody. Anytime Harry got Voldemort's sympathy or concern it was like a _gut reflex._ Like wincing to a sharp burn. It didn't mean anything.

Voldemort's smugness seemed louder, and Harry was, suddenly, swamped by a familiar anger. His own. He didn't know anything of what was going on. Not what his friends were doing. Not why Dementors were on the _muggle_ street. Not how he was supposed to do any-bloody-thing and stop Voldemort. His soulmate.

There was a loud, firm tap at the window. Harry looked up to see a familiar bird clutching an elaborate letter with ink patterns down the edges and an intricate seal. A Ministry bird. Did they have an explanation for the Dementors? He crossed the room to open the window, letting the owl in to peck at the food he always left out for the messenger birds. It swooped over and gave a grateful hoot.

Harry was frozen at the window. The letter was open in his hands.

 _Mr Potter. [...] Questioning. [...] Please arrange for transport to a suitable venue, as the Ministry of Magic understands that you may not be comfortable meeting in a muggle environment. [...] Witness to A-grade Dark Arts performed on the street of Little Whinging—_

His gut curled with dread. His mind filled with images of being locked up in Azkaban. They'd realise it was him. That it was _Voldemort's_ magic. And then everyone would know. Everybody. Voldemort would know. People would call for Harry to be killed. They would use Harry and kill Tom. In fact, all that needed to happen was for word to get out that Harry had been attacked by Dementors. _Then_ Voldemort would definitely be suspicious, and he'd match up the dates, and then he'd _know-!_

Another owl swooped in, dropping a plain envelope onto his lap. He tore it open, desperate for answers. What the hell, what the hell, he thought. This couldn't be happening. Please be a letter of rescindation.

 _We're coming to get you. Don't worry._ Lupin wrote. _Pack your things. You can't stay there any longer._

Fat lot of _goddamn_ explanation _that_ was. Harry ripped it apart, feeling the paper shred in his hands. The room was too small. Something expanded in his chest: panic that he thought he'd left behind on the street. He needed- something, anything. To feel less like a bird stuck in a cage, heart fluttering against his ribs. Dementors. Voldemort. The threat of being found out. Having to find some way to lie to the Ministry. Why the hell was all this going on? He felt Tom in the back of his head run a soothing hand over his turbulent emotions. " _Shh, little bird. Little gun in the hand."_ rolled over his fingers.

 _Fuck **off**_. he thought back.

He needed to hide his hands again before the Order came. The Order that hadn't been there when it was supposed to.

The bandages he'd tossed to one side were not an option. He threw open one of his drawers and dug in for one of his old shirts, tore it into strips. Wrangled it around his hand and tied it into a knot, then began throwing his belongings into random piles. Needed this, needed that, did not need any of these letters filled with platitudes... The owls gave him baleful hoots and then fluttered off, out the windows. When was the Order even coming? He paused midst the chaos he'd made of his room. Maybe not even today.

Well. Not as though anyone'd tell him. He continued packing.

—

"We're coming to get you" meant three days, apparently. Three days of Harry sitting on edge, feeling Voldemort sooth him like one would pet a cat, tearing up old shirts because the Dursleys refused to offer him wraps because he wasn't supposed to be outside, and feeling incredibly hungry.

"We're going out." Petunia said, opening the door and eyeing his room suspiciously. He'd stuffed everything under the bed. "Don't do anything stupid—"

"Petunia!" came his Uncle's voice from downstairs.

"—and don't leave the house." she finished in a rush, then the door slammed shut and Harry jumped to his feet. He was certain this was when the Order was going to come. And come they did, in the middle of the night, tripping over sofas and all kinds of shit. Harry was dozing in the living room when he heard them arrive.

"Ack!" He heard someone swear. "What— what on earth even _is_ this thing?"

" _Hey!"_ Harry yelled back into the dark house and felt the Order members lapse into silence. The lights flooded the rooms and Harry could've slumped with relief. There they were. Familiar faces. It felt like he'd be going home, getting answers, leaving this hellhole. Noise washed over him and, before he knew it, Remus was ordering people around the house to pick up whatever belongings of Harry were still locked away. Harry got up to help them, but a firm hand landed on his shoulder.

"Potter." It was Mad-eye Moody. The real one, this time, though Harry probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway. "A moment, here." His mad eye seemed to be following someone's progress through the house as the other stared at Harry. "Look, before we get underway and you're dragged off by all your little friends, a few words of caution." He seemed to lean closer. "Do _not_ mention Dementors to any of your friends. Don't mention them in the hearing. Stick to ignorance. You don't know anything that happened; we're taking you out because it clearly isn't safe anymore."

No wonder people were so tight-lipped in the Order! Harry opened his mouth to protest when Moody fixed him with a particularly sharp glare. With both eyes. "Word gets back to You-Know-Who and he'll know it's Harry Potter." the man growled.

Someone might as well have taken the floor out from under him. "What–" he spluttered. Moody– Moody _knew?_ He couldn't think of how that sentence would've made sense in any other way.

"Look, Potter." Moody was staring again. "Innermost members of the Order know. We were lucky Crouch never got it out of me and that we don't have it down on paper." When he saw Harry's expression, he scowled. "What, you think we don't know what we're fighting for?"

"No," Harry managed. It was just that– How could these people know and not look at Harry like he was some sort of monster? It was inconceivable to Harry. The identity of his soulmate was his dark, dirty secret... and other people knew and didn't spit on him for it.

Moody just blew air between his teeth and moved away. "Come on!" he barked to the rest of the house, where Lupin was emerging with Hedwig on his arms. "Get a move on!"

—

The first thing that happened in Grimmauld place was that Harry was ushered away. Moody, Lupin, Sirius, Snape and a few other unrecognisable faces were sitting in chairs or pacing around the room while the doors were warded to high hell. Instructions for the hearing: plead ignorance. He didn't know anything. They wouldn't be able to trace that the magic had been produced through him, because it would have the signature of his soulmate: who the Ministry didn't have in their database.

"Wait. Wait wait wait wait," Harry said, and every eye turned to him. Their gazes were heavy and he couldn't help but shift in unease. This was probably why he didn't start demanding answers right at the start. "How did you know there were actually Dementors? Don't you want to actually know—"

"Mrs Figg is one of ours. She saw the Dementors." Moody cut in. "And we know pretty well what happened. Dementors come, you can't make a Patronus, and You-Know-Who steps in to command them away. That right, Potter?"

"Well– yes, it is right. But how do you know Voldemort didn't order the Dementors in the first place?"

At this, Lupin replied. "It wasn't him. He would send more than Dementors, and besides, he hasn't figured out it's you yet, has he?" The man was smiling slightly, as if hopeful. Harry tried not to look at him. "The person who _did_ send them is a wild card, though."

Lupin knew all this time and he hadn't told Harry. Wouldn't it have been nice to know that there were other people out there? That Harry didn't have to sit with the secret alone? He knew he was being petulant in cold-shouldering Lupin and Sirius; of course they couldn't have written it down, or said it aloud unless they were in an absolute secure place like this, but even a _hint_ would've meant the world.

"We'll get you an antidote for Veritaserum beforehand." Moody continued. "And don't step on any toes. You haven't given Fudge any real reason for him to hate you yet. Don't. He's just calling in all magic users in the area for witness accounts."

"Okay." Harry said. "But can I ask _how_ you all know who my soulmate is?"

He saw Sirius glance up at Lupin and slide his hand across the table not-very-surreptitiously to take his soulmate's hand. Snape, who looked bored with the entire ordeal, didn't even display any change in expression. A lady who Harry didn't know thinned her lips. Moody just regarded him.

"There's a prophecy–" Sirius began.

" _Sirius."_ Moody snapped in the same instant Snape said steely, without moving: "Black."

"Come _on._ Harry's been kept in the dark for too–" Lupin squeezed in warning and his godfather shut up, but it was enough. Harry knew why Sirius had said it. It's because he felt guilty, of course, and Harry felt a little guilty too, for prompting Sirius to spill beans like this.

Still, a prophecy, huh? He owed Sirius one.

The chair scraped against the floor in a horrible screech as Harry stood, and once again each eye turned to him. "Ok, great, okay," he stumbled over his words. "Brief– debrief done, right? You don't need me anymore?" No one stopped him, so he headed to the door with a horrid awkwardness hanging around him. "And– thanks, I guess." He heard Snape snort.

But Harry left the room anyway and Mrs Weasley was outside cleaning what looked a little like a shelf. Or maybe it was a shoe rack. She gestured for him to go upstairs, "They're all waiting for you, Harry. Don't worry, we've moved all your trunks up too." and he did, pausing at some points to admire the elf heads mounted on the walls and the dark, dreary atmosphere that clung to the place like a dying cloud.

Admire. Yeah right. He kept his eyes on the floor and hurried right by, so intent on not looking up that he nearly missed the door. He was _here._ Had to fight not to grin.

"Harry!"

And also a, "Hey, Harry," from Ron.

There was only a blur of brown before Hermione was clinging to him and dragging him into the room. "Oh my god, you're finally here! Can you believe it? We were so worried after we heard there'd been someone performing Dark Arts, and A-grade, can you believe? That's the sort that Death Eaters use, and they'd been right outside your house! You should've heard Mrs Weasley tear them out after–"

"Hermione, Hermione." Harry smiled, extracting himself. "Hi, Ron." he called to the corner of the room, where Ron was trying to arrange bits and pieces of something on his bed. "What's that?"

"Sirius gave me something and, uh. Fred and George broke it. _Reparo_ isn't working so I have to try to fix it like a muggle."

"Harry, here." Hermione shoved something into his hands, and it was a newspaper clipping. Harry started. He'd almost forgotten about the 'terrorist' attack that he was sure Voldemort had orchestrated. "We know you've been dying to hear, so we saved this for you. It's utter trash, it is! We don't know what really..."

He tuned her out as he focused on the words on the page.

 _Albus Dumbledore throws accusations around the Wizengamot in display of crumbling perception_

 _Last night, in light of a recent, harmless 'attack' involving nothing more than a bar fight, aging Headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, raised the suggestion that You-Know-Who's supporters were behind the miniscule brawl._

" _It's terrifying," one Ministry worker attests, "that a man so delusional is teaching our children."_

 _It certainly calls to question the integrity of the once-famed wizard who was considered the most powerful magic practitioner in Britain; when surveying the extent to which Dumbledore has fallen in recent years, there coalesces a rather disturbing image indeed: formed through the activities he recklessly permits across the grounds of his Wizarding school._

Harry put the newspaper aside. He already knew what the rest of it would look like. "Do they mention me, too?" Hermione was watching him closely, as if afraid he'd blow up.

"Yeah." Ron said from the bed. "All the stunts they've let you 'get away with' show Dumbledore's crackpot aging, 'pparently."

"Well." He stretched. "They can't possibly get much on me. I'm prepared to be good this year." It was true; he wasn't going to _run out_ and try to stop Voldemort's raids or something. That'd reveal him and do nothing. Harry was planning to... 'work from home'. The _Prophet_ wouldn't get more dirty shit. Let them slander all they wanted on things they'd already slandered. He had bigger fish to fry.

Harry flipped open his trunk and was in the process of emptying everything out when something caught his eye. "Is that– a Slytherin symbol?"

Hermione and Ron simultaneously donned guilty expressions.

"Sirius gave you a _Slytherin heirloom?_ " He crossed the room to get a closer look, and there it was, undeniably the Slytherin snake in all its hissing glory, etched on one of the metal bits Ron was trying to clip back together.

"I– my uh, they– They figured out my soulmate was a Slytherin."

The slander had barely fazed him, but now Harry's legs were threatening to give out. " _What?_ " _Ron?_

His friend's smile was practically _dreamy._ "Yeah. Can you believe it? Probably the best Slytherin chick out of the lot. She's, like,–"

"You know what," Harry said hurriedly, "I don't want to know who it is yet, oh gods, I'll never get that image out of my head if you tell me now and it'll ruin all my exams–" and then he remembered, with a snap of guilt, who the other half of _his_ soul was, and his clicked his mouth shut abruptly.

Blissfully unaware, Hermione and Ron just laughed and spent the rest of the day tormenting Harry as to who the Slytherin lady could be.

They never even asked him why his hands were always wrapped. They knew better, by now.

—

Although in the days leading up to the 'witness's account' Harry's guts felt like they were roiling around in his stomach and Voldemort kept smoothing out his emotions as though he were petting an angered cat, the actual incident started out fairly uneventful.

Mr Weasley took him to the Ministry of Magic, he didn't have the stomach to properly appreciate all the fountains and the glistening floors, the paper planes floating around and the magic whirling in the air, and then he sat in a small room with a bored employee who gave him Veritaserum and then asked questions. It was a private interrogation with an interrogator who clearly didn't believe the Boy-Who-Lived (slandered as he may have been), weedy fifth-year, could've cast incredible dark magic. Because that was what they were really looking for, wasn't it? The person who'd cast the spell. If there were any actual witnesses, they would've independently contacted the Ministry and offered everything they'd known out of fear.

Just a slow waste of time. Time, unspooling from their hands and dripping away down the drains.

Harry had it all well-rehearsed. He'd been muttering it to sleep until Ron had thrown so many pillows at him that the redhead didn't have any left to actually sleep on. "No. I wasn't there. I was fighting my fat cousin at home because he was trying to sate some sort of superiority complex." It was always best to mix some truth in.

The employee made some sort of mark on a piece of paper in front of him. They were separated by a piece of enchanted glass, surrounded by white walls, and probably overseen by some sort of recording device. "Are you, to the best of your knowledge, aware of any magic users that may have been present during or before the event occurred?"

The door creaked open just as Harry was about to answer.

"Excuse me." the employee said in his same disgruntled, monotone voice. "Please remain outside for the duration of this–"

"I am authorised," came a smug voice. Harry turned to see a squat woman in a horrendous pink outfit, fitted with heels that looked like they could destroy an innocent man's foot with a well-placed step. "Senior Undersecretary Dolores Umbridge. Now, if you would please, I have a few questions for Mr Potter here." She flashed him a wide, anticipatory smile.

The employee seemed happy enough to give way to the Umbridge lady, and Harry could feel dread pooling in him, starting from his toes, crawling through his veins as the employee moved away and fussed with some latches to let himself out from behind the glass.

Harry's hands weren't wrapped, for appearances, and so he was most definitely two seconds away bursting into a full sweat when the words " _always panicking..."_ appeared on his hands. " _noisy."_

 _Help me,_ he begged back. _Shit, shit shit. Help._

Here he was, trying to get help from Voldemort from the Ministry. It would be funny if Harry wasn't about to get pinned like a fly by this distinctly toad-looking woman. Speaking of, why hadn't Umbridge taken a seat yet? The employee had left. She was just–

He jumped when something wrapped around his chest. "What–?"

"Sit still." she said sickeningly sweetly, a threat dripping around her words.

"Hey, what– no way." He tried to twist around and level her with an indignant stare. "I'm pretty sure no matter what sort of fancy title you have, you're not allowed to _tie people up._ "

"Oh, I'm not tying you up, Mr Potter. I'm setting up a polygraph."

A polygraph.

A–

He hadn't been panicking before. He was panicking _now._ His previous fears came crashing back in. She was going to find out he was lying, and she was going to dig out the fact that he'd 'used' the dark magic, and he'd be grilled until the truth came out about Dementors, and the public would inevitably hear, and with the public, so would _Voldemort._

She strapped two metal plates to his fingers and tied them, all the while glancing back to hold his eyes and smile. Then she looked down, eyes lingering on Voldemort's fucking thoughts.

 _Help me help me help me holy shit._

"Now, let's get started, shall we?" She stepped away and slid into place behind the glass, pulling out a large rectangular contraption with all sorts of knobs, hooked up to the few cuffs and sensors wrapped around his chest, arms, and fingers. The polygraph.

Could he squirm away? Get it to somehow malfunction?

The machine turned on and little needles began drawing coloured lines on a paper that was churned out of the polygraph.

 _Where was Voldemort when you needed him?_

"Mr Potter. Have you ever committed a crime?"

"Yes." he blurted. He was supposed to be under Veritaserum, after all. "Uh huh. Heaps." The familiar presence stirred at the back of his mind and he threw himself at it. _Help me, Gods, help, Tom!_

Her smile widened. "Have you ever lied to get out of trouble?"

Oh, fuck you, lady. "Yep." he said again. "You wouldn't believe." He hoped his blood pressure and readings were already so wild they'd throw her off. Tom, in the meantime, sluggishly reached forwards and Harry welcomed him with desperation.

"Did you take the antidote for Veritaserum before this questioning?"

Oh _no way._

Tom slipped in, a knife coming home, his presence warm in Harry's mind. Calm fell over him with all the suddenness of night.

"No." Harry said.

Her smile faltered and Harry, somewhere far detached from his body, crowed.

"Have you ever stolen anything from someone that you knew was important to them?"

"No." Harry said.

"Were you the one who cast Dark magic in Little Whinging?"

"No." Harry lied seamlessly. Tom wasn't controlling him; nothing like that. It was just– with Tom there, Harry felt peaceful and whole. He had been a lake in in turmoil, but when Tom arrived and sat by the edge, dipped a foot in, the waters spun and came to a gentle stop in equilibrium. He wasn't stupid. He knew how a polygraph worked. Breathe in, out. Steady pace. His body wouldn't give him away because his wasn't not stressed.

Her hand slammed down onto the table and she pressed her face right up to the glass. "You're lying."

"No." Harry said, without any change in intonation, and the tightening around her eyes confirmed her bluff.

"Were you there during the incident in Little Whinging?"

"No." Harry said.

Umbridge stared at him, seeming to tremble. She ripped out the cords of the polygraph and Harry could only watch in distant alarm. The latches slammed open again and then she was on his side, leaning right over him with her bulging eyes staring directly into his. "I'm going to keep you here." she hissed. "I'm going to keep you here until that antidote wears out, and I'm going to _rip_ a confession–"

Harry was _tired_ of doors banging open.

"Harry." That was Mr Weasley, and by gods was Harry glad, because he didn't think he'd be able to squirm his way out if Umbridge really imprisoned him. "Your time's up, and you're–"

"Heh- _hem._ Senior Undersecretary Dolores Umbridge–"

"– _designated to leave._ " Mr Weasley actually appeared to be grinding his teeth as he glared at the woman in pink. "If you want to keep him longer, you'll have to apply for that through 27 different legal channels. Now, Harry. Get that contraption off of you and we'll get going." Never had he imagined Mr Weasley would look at a muggle invention with such loathing.

Harry was only too glad to leave. As the door closed behind him, Tom uncoiled from his mind and slipped away, but not without an automatic last, lingering touch that seemed to say _don't worry, anxious gun-in-hand. Silent weapon._

Then Harry's mind was quiet and all he wanted to do was sleep.

* * *

a/n edit: that Order scene because I used the word "order" a lot

hey, thank you all for you patience! this was a bit of a longer one to make up for my absence. wanted to pull it further to the get to the more tom/voldemort-oriented scenes, but seriously, i dont want chapter lengths to have too huge a disparity. and once i start writing tom i won't want to end the scene anywhere.

also wtf _so many grammatical errors_ in my past chapters and stories involving dialogue. **hell.** i'd edit them all but the docs are gone now, and i don't want to scroll through the huge master documents and recutting and re-editing. if any of you were screaming when you read something like "She said.", it's ok now, whew, the worst is over.

so what have i been doing? ? a lot of things, but you probably dont want to hear my excuses and you probably hear them all the time so nvm lol

can't promise anything soon in the coming weeks & months! sorry ;~;


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